The Classical World (76 page)

The process, surely, varied from place to place. In distant Britain, according to the historian Tacitus, it was helped along by the governor Agricola, Tacitus’ own father-in-law. Agricola, he tells us, encouraged the building of ‘temples, forums and houses’.
¹
Archaeologically, we cannot yet weigh up this initiative, and so the current inclination is to disbelieve it, because Tacitus was writing a highly favourable book about the man involved. But in the Greek East there are scores of well-attested cases when emperors or governors did indeed encourage such buildings, and by comparison Britain was wild and only recently conquered. As in the East, military specialists from the army could be sent to help the first building-projects off to a good start. Taxes, even, might be diverted to kick-start them: within the Empire as a whole Agricola’s initiative is not as unprecedented as local Western archaeologists sometimes suggest.

His son-in-law, Tacitus, described it as the softening of a warlike people by pleasures, in order to accustom them to ‘peace and quiet’: if Tacitus thought in this way, his father-in-law Agricola could surely have thought on these realistic lines too. The sons of the British leaders are said, surely rightly, to have been exposed very quickly to Latin education. The toga became ‘frequent’ and, on Tacitus’ view, there
was a gradual descent into seductive ‘vices’, encouraged by ‘colon-nades, baths and elegant dinners’. The ‘simple Britons called it “civilization”, although it was part of their slavery’.
²
Here, Tacitus uses one of his (and antiquity’s) favourite contrasts, between ‘free’ hardy barbarians and soft ‘enslaved’ subjects. Yet he need not have been the only one to see ‘luxury’ as an aid to imperial subjection. In southern Britain, such ‘slavery’ to pleasure had already begun some while before Agricola arrived, as archaeology shows at London or St Albans and manifestly so at Bath. The Roman fashion for bathing was rapidly imitated by provincials: the local hot springs at Bath were already serving Roman bathers by
c.
AD
65, about twenty years before Agricola.

In less barbarous provinces, the governors and emperors surely gave similar encouragement for the sake of maintaining peace and quiet. There was little need for official encouragement anyway. On their own initiative, the local upper classes took swiftlyto the new avenues of display and competition which Rome offered. There were new titles to be had, new privileges to be paraded. This ‘status display’ even underlies the most individual and immediate art-works to survive from any imperial province: the portraits on wood panels found in Egyptian mummy-burials and dating from
c.
AD
40 onwards. Men and women are immortalized in these lifelike portraits, as if old age did not exist, yet the representations are also status-conscious.
³
They are mostly painted on specially imported woods, lime-wood or box. Some of their women wear the up-to-date hairstyles, earrings and jewellery which we know in contemporary Italy, and yet only one of those depicted bears the names of a Roman citizen. Perhaps, like Roman funerary-masks, these portraits were displayed in funerary processions: it is attractive to connect them with the membership, or claimed membership, of the privileged Greek-speaking class in Egypt’s main towns, people who had been benefited under the Empire by an exemption from paying poll tax. Their culture of portraits marked them out as distinguished people, a cut above their tax-paying inferiors.

Many of the new types of provincial display were more comfortable and much more elegant than pre-Roman life. In Augustus’ lifetime the most famous symbol of rural peace, the villa, had already become
widespread in southern Gaul. In Britain, its heyday was to be later, and a century or more would pass before landowners in Somerset or Gloucestershire could boast true country-house living, with mosaic floors and happy memories of their days’ hunting, under the patronage (in the Cotswolds) of their special young god of the chase. It is to Romans that Britain owes so many of its ‘native’ trees, the cherryor the walnut. It also owes them many staples of better cooking, coriander, peaches, celeryor carrots. To an educated Roman eye, the Britons’ local country-house culture was probably rather curious, with its copycat buildings and a local flavour to the lifestyle. There was only one area of equal exchange. Italians, it seems, introduced the domestic cat to Gaul; provincial dogs, in turn, transformed Italians’ packs of hounds. There was real progress here, people noted in the age of Hadrian, beyond the breeds of dog which had formerly been known to the Greeks.

To our age of exclusive religions, religion might seem likely to be a more contentious transplant. Religious cults of Rome and the emperor were indeed encouraged in provincial capitals, and they too became objects of extravagant competition. At Colchester in Britain, the temple of the deified Emperor Claudius was described by Tacitus both as a ‘citadel of eternal domination’ and also as a cause of bankruptcy among prominent Britons who ‘poured out their fortunes under the guise of religion’.
⁴
There was no stopping their leaders’ extravagance in this headlong new game of ‘dynasty’. Conversely, there was no drive among the emperors or senators to civilize provincials for the sake of spreading a true religion. In Gaul and Britain, pre-Roman ‘Druid’ religion was actively suppressed, but only because of its barbarous aspects (probably including human sacrifice): the moral tone of cults had been a long-running Roman concern. A similar concern probably underlies Hadrian’s interference with the Jews in Judaea. Beliefs, however, were not the issue: local gods, if morally innocuous, were twinned with a Graeco-Roman divinity and simply given a double name (‘Mercurius Dumias’). The Roman residents and local upper classes tended to honour the god of the Graeco-Roman name only, while their inferiors preferred the explicit twinning. As so much Roman religion was concerned with worldly success and well-being, non-Roman polytheists could accommodate the new package without difficulty: they shared the same priorities.

If we take Roman law and Roman citizenship as the really important markers, there was official Roman concern to extend them, but even this concern is different from an active drive for social inclusion or a mission to civilize. Roman citizenship was traditionally bestowed in return for meritorious services; Augustus had been very sparing of it and had kept records at Rome of those few who had merited it. Even Claudius followed this principle, despite a contemporary satire on his wish to put all the Gauls and Britons into citizen-togas. One continuing road to deserving citizenship was army-service as an auxiliary; another was service as an upper-class magistrate in specially designated towns, or
municipia
. The grant of the status of
municipium
to a town under Roman rule was not automatic. Not until the 70s did the Emperor Vespasian give it to towns of Spain (probably, to the towns throughout Spain). Even there, the main reason was a calculated reward. Spain had played an important part in the recent Civil Wars and so the leaders of the towns needed a favour.

From recently discovered inscriptions, we can now better reconstruct the outlines of a guiding ‘municipal law’ for Spain.
⁵
The initial grant of municipal status gave the magistrates in these towns the right to Roman citizenship. Importantly, Roman citizenship did not exempt its recipients from the obligation of serving their home town as liturgists. They still had to give time and resources: emperors wanted to maintain vigorous local cities, on which the collection of taxes rested, and Augustus had explicitly asserted that Roman citizens still had their local obligations. So the upper classes were to pay for most of the amenities of civic life, continuing a pattern which had begun in the archaic Greek city-states and had spread as cities multiplied in the lands of Roman rule.

In classical Athens, the undertaking of liturgies had been kept separate from the holding of magistracies. Outside the older Greek city-states this distinction between benefaction and political office was not upheld, even before the Romans’ conquests. It was not observed in the new
municipia
, either. In Spanish
municipia
, the magistrates were drawn onlyfrom the councillors, and the councillors were themselves drawn only from the better-off. They paid an entrance fee on joining the council, and their service was for life. They would then ‘promise’ benefactions or accept liturgies as magistrates. There was
no question of random selection by lot or popular participation on a council in the classical Athenian style. Nor was the ‘Latin right’ planned to be a stage halfway on the road to full Roman citizenship for all citizens. It was an end in itself, a careful limitation of the Roman citizenship to a community’s upper orders. The Roman citizenship protected such people against arbitrary violence by Roman officials and allowed them to make valid marriages with other Roman citizens. They could also make wills and enter on contracts which would be valid under Roman law before Roman officials. In return, the citizenship bound them closely to Rome’s interests. It was an important part of ‘class rule’ in the Empire.

Nonetheless, the other citizens of these ‘municipal’ towns were also affected by their towns’ new status. They were expected to worship Roman cults and in dealings between themselves they too were to apply Roman civil laws as ‘Latins’. Those who already traded with Roman citizens would have found this provision convenient, although it was somewhat perplexing for most people. In the 70s
AD
there were no law books and no local law schools and a real understanding of Roman law was surely rare among most provincials, as it still is among most of us. In principle, Roman laws did affect many family matters, including inheritance and marriage, the freeing of slaves and the powers, so huge, of a Roman father over his household. But there was sure to be confusion here. Arguably, the municipal law in Spain arose from an attempt by the Emperor Domitian to regulate abuses and ‘Spanish practices’ in the towns in the wake of Vespasian’s initial Latin grant to them. Behind these charters, there will have been more of an aspiration and an ideal than a reality realized in every matter of detail.

In the East, by contrast, this ‘Latin right’ was not granted to cities. The leaders of Greek civic life had their own robust culture already, and so Romans let it continue. Roman citizenship was rarer in the East, especially in those provinces without legions (legionaries were Roman citizens). Quiet and loyalty had already been secured here by supporting the existing upper classes against their lower classes, and so there was no need for yet another grant of privileges to them. Nonetheless, Roman law does turn up in the East in individual cases. In Hadrian’s reign, we can find its forms in the civil petition of a
Jewish woman, Babatha, some of whose papers have survived for us in a desert cave in Judaea. As Babatha wanted to press her case with a Roman governor, she appears to have found someone to draw up her Greek petition in terms which the governor might recognize from his Roman background. Other petitioners no doubt did the same, but they did so by artful choice, not legal necessity.

In the East, the most sensitive area of Roman rule was Judaea itself. Under Antony’s appointee King Herod, classical civic building and ‘luxury’ had been lavishly advanced in this region. Herod’s successors founded cities too, even up by the Sea of Galilee. Yet the results were not peace and quiet. In
AD
6, ten years after Herod’s death, Augustus brought Judaea under direct rule. The sequel, as usual, was a Roman census but it provoked keen opposition from particular Jews, who could cite a scriptural precedent against it. One group argued that allegiance was owed only to God: they became the Zealots (or ‘dagger men’,
sicarii
, in their victims’ name for them), the only anti-Roman ‘philosophy’ to arise in the entire Empire.
⁶
They were the Empire’s first terrorists.

During his Civil War in the East, Julius Caesar had already approached the Jews and their religion with respect. Precedents here went back to the Persian kings in the sixth century
BC
. From Augustus on, the emperors also paid for sacrifices in the Jerusalem Temple to be offered on their behalf. Most of the Jews were not unwilling recipients of these favours, and under Augustus favours were even confirmed for individual Jewish Diaspora communities scattered outside Judaea who were so often at risk to the citizen-bodies of Greek cities and their resentment. Under Roman rule, Jews were even exempted from the military service which they had once rendered to Alexander’s Successors. Some of the Romans, meanwhile, proved susceptible to the Jews’ ancient God and to the link between his cult and a code of ethics. During the first century
AD
several adherents to Jewish religion are traceable in high Roman society, especially among women, who were outside the most active power-structures of Roman life (where strict Judaism would have been more difficult). Women could also convert without the pain of circumcision.

Nonetheless, anti-Jewish stereotypes were still current and not only among the Greeks of Alexandria where anti-Semitism had originated.
‘Politically incorrect’ Roman governors of Judaea found it hard to respect the local ethnic proprieties. Uniquely, the Jews worshipped only one God and had strict prohibitions against Gentiles entering their Temple. In reply, they attracted a series of Roman taunts and insults, ranging from the bringing of military standards into Jerusalem to some rude farting by a Roman soldier at an angry Jewish crowd. Under Claudius, the province of Judaea became the plaything of imperial favourites. First, it was assigned to Herod’s grandson, Agrippa I, who had assisted Claudius in his bizarre accession; then it went to Felix, the brother of the over-important freedman Pallas who had intrigued for Claudius’ ill-judged marriage to Agrippina (Felix even named a city ‘Agrippina’ after her). Not for nothing was Paul the Christian said to have lectured Felix on ‘justice, self control and the judgement to come until Felix begged him to stop’.
⁷
Some ten years later Nero’s gorgeous wife, Poppaea, fixed the appointment of a disastrous governor of Judaea simply because she was friendly with his wife. Poppaea probably meant no mischief; she had shown herself sympathetic to a Jewish embassy and among all her personal luxury, she is said to have been sympathetic to the Jews’ God. However, her choice as governor, Gessius Florus, was a tactless choice, by origin a Roman knight from a Greek city. He gratuitously enraged his subjects and helped to provoke a major Jewish War.