The Classical World (85 page)

However, Trajan’s entire conquests then blew up around him. In spring 116 the trouble began with the Jews. Their revolts spread from Libya (Cyrene) through Cyprus and Egypt, encouraged by fellow Jews who were fleeing from the conquered Parthian sector. The Near East was thrown into revolt. Armenia was attacked and had to be partly given away and Trajan’s Mesopotamian conquests rose in rebellion. In 116 Trajan spent a hot summer there besieging the stronglywalled city of Hatra. He was lucky that the defendants just missed his conspicuous grey head as he rode past without a helmet. To cap it all, Dacia broke into war again.

These upheavals cost thousands of lives, especially in the large Jewish population on Cyprus and the yet bigger Jewish communities in Egypt. There was even a glimpse of the end of the world. Down in southern Mesopotamia, war among the ‘angels of the north’ was seen at this time in a vision byone Elchasai, evidentlya Christian member of a strict Baptist community.
⁶
Elchasai’s concerns were very different to Trajan’s. What he saw was a vision of an angel and a (female) HolySpirit who were promising one last forgiveness of sins to Christian sinners: this ‘sin’, to a pagan outsider, would have seemed like a condition created by their foolish Christian faith. Then the world as Trajan knew it would end. Elchasai wrote up his vision in a book which survived to inspire another Christian visionaryin this region more than a century later, Mani. Mani’s post-Christian ‘Gospel of Light’ survived for many centuries and was called Manichaeism by its many enemies.

There was to be no such second chance for Trajan. He left Hadrian with the armies in Syria and in 117 withdrew westwards. In early August he was declared ill, and he died in Cilicia on the southern coast of Turkey, aged sixty-two. It was a potentially chaotic moment, with so many rebellions still in progress around him. Who was to succeed him? Hadrian was nearby and, as he had been named consul already for the following year, he was a natural choice. But had he yet been chosen formally? On 9 August Hadrian could claim receipt of documents in Syria which conveniently ‘proved’ his adoption. On 11 August news then came to him, even more conveniently, that Trajan was dead. Later historians wrote of Trajan’s sickness and described symptoms which suggest a heart attack. But there were other strong possibilities. On 12 August Trajan’s intimate palace-secretary Phaedimus died too, the man who had once been Trajan’s official ‘taster’ of foods and his personal butler. Only after many years were Phaedimus’ ashes conveyed back to Rome: had there been a wish not to draw too much attention to the emperor’s taster’s death? Later in the century, the senatorial historian Dio was told firmly by his father that Hadrian had never been adopted by Trajan at all, that his death had been concealed for a while by those close to him and that the letter informing the Senate of Hadrian’s ‘adoption’ was actuallysigned by Trajan’s wife, Plotina. Was the cause of death sickness, or was Trajan poisoned along with Phaedimus the butler? Scandal later alleged that Hadrian had bribed Trajan’s freedmen and had had sex with his boy-favourites in the hope of assuring his own succession. What we do know is that Hadrian promptly withdrew from Trajan’s ‘conquests’ in Mesopotamia.

The truth of his predecessor’s death remains buried with Hadrian. It is an ironic silence because the distinction of this period is not military but historical: it saw two Latin accounts of the imperial past, both of which are classics for our understanding of the Roman emperors. One of them is also a work of genius which sets freedom, luxury and justice among its prominent themes. Significantly, neither of their authors risked writing the history of Trajan’s reign itself.

Presenting the Past

I strongly predict – and my prediction does not mislead me – that your histories will be immortal: so, all the more (I will admit it, candidly) I want to be included in them
…

Pliny to Tacitus,
Letters
7.33

From Augustus to Hadrian, the Roman ‘First Citizens’ live on for us as individuals. The reason for this afterlife is only marginally their archaeological remains; their sculptures and buildings spread such lies by presenting their patrons only as they wished to be seen. Until Domitian, the emperors live so vividly because they are described in texts, in the biographies of Suetonius and the penetrating histories of Tacitus.

Both of these authors ranked among Pliny’s friends. Suetonius was the younger of the two and benefited from Pliny’s patronage: Pliny exercised ‘suffrage’ for him by writing and asking for favours on his behalf. Significantly, the word ‘suffrage’ now applied to intercession, not (as formerly) to the free exercise of a Roman citizen’s vote.
¹
Tacitus, by contrast, needed none of Pliny’s suffrage. His formidable learning was recognized early. Hence, in 88 he was appointed one of the Roman priests who oversaw foreign cults, of which Christianity would have been one. Tacitus was a fine orator and was a consul three years before Pliny. Pliny published eleven letters to him in order to show proof of a friendship which would dignify himself. Like Pliny, Tacitus loved hunting, but he also had a style, an insight and a capacity for judgement which Pliny, his good friend, lacked.

Suetonius was of equestrian rank. Perhaps his family hailed from
north Africa. He was never a senator, but he held three literary posts in the emperor’s household, including the job of librarian, and travelled very interestingly. He was with Pliny in Bithynia and later he was with Hadrian in Britain. In 122 his career came to a halt there. Later gossip alleged that he had been ‘too familiar’ in Britain with Hadrian’s disgruntled wife, Sabina.

Suetonius’ most famous surviving works are his
Lives of the Caesars
which included, revealingly, a
Life
of Julius Caesar: Suetonius did not avoid describing the life of the real founder of ‘the Empire’. The strengths of the best of his
Lives
are their vivid details and their use (in the case of Augustus’
Life
) of the emperor’s own letters and autobiography. Through anecdotes, they bring out each emperor’s fondness for ‘luxury’ and they observe each man’s practice of giving justice. They are interested in astrology and in most of the emperors’ revealing fondness for it. They are also our best sources for each emperor’s origins and physical appearance. The best emperors, in Suetonius’ view, were Augustus and Vespasian, the two obvious choices.

Suetonius’
Lives
became a model for later biographers, especially for the important life of the post-Roman ‘emperor’ Charlemagne, written by Einhard (
c.
AD
850). However, their understanding and their accuracyare limited. The further Suetonius went on, the weaker the
Lives
become: perhaps, after his dismissal in Britain, research became harder. He is at his best with anecdotes, especially when reporting stories contemporary with himself. Did Nero really dress himself up in animal skins, have himself let out of a cage and then attack the private parts of men and women who were tied to stakes, before being sexually gratified by a freedman whom he had married? Such was the gossip fifty years later. Suetonius also insisted that he had discovered from ‘quite a few people’ that Nero was convinced that nobody was chaste in any part of his body, and that everyone concealed this fact.
²
His researches are evidence, at least, for people’s later attitudes to Julio-Claudian debauchery.

What he ignores is the cardinal issue of liberty. Here, we have to look to his greater contemporary, Tacitus. Whereas Suetonius was only an equestrian and a functionaryin the emperor’s service, Tacitus was a senator and a consul, ranks for which ‘liberty’ was a living
issue. Pliny was already aware that Tacitus was the real genius of his age, the one with whom he would do well to be associated. Like Pliny, Tacitus was not born in Rome. Almost certainly, he came from southern Gaul, perhaps from Vasio (modern Vaison). The south of Gaul was heavily Italianized, however, and was no more ‘provincial’ than north Italy. Tacitus’ career rose quickly to a consulship and then to the grand provincial governorship of Asia: the rise was even more rapid and the result more distinguished than Pliny’s own. Born in
c.
58, Tacitus’ progress has now been confirmed in more detail by renewed study of what appears to be part of his funerary inscription, found in Rome.
³

Like Pliny, Tacitus had prospered as a senator under Domitian, but he was explicit about the compromises which were imposed on him at that time. As a senator, he knew the relevance of hypocrisy and fraudulence in human nature. ‘Liberty’ was a cardinal value to him, but he also fraternized with contemporaries ‘who knew too much to be hopeful’.
⁴
He wrote variously, on oratory (where he diagnosed correctly the connection between great oratory and a free political context) and on his father-in-law, Agricola, the governor of Britain (Tacitus gave fine words on ‘freedom’ to a northern Caledonian chieftain). He was not at all blind to provincial life. He wrote good things on the Gauls (though nothing on Spain). He also wrote a remarkable text on Germany, where his father had served and where he himself had also, probably, spent part of his career. Liberty, he wrote, is beloved by Germans, but discipline is not. Germans are prone to strong emotions, and their priests are more powerful than their kings. There is real thought and observation here and he is not inventing his Germans simply by crediting them with the converse of Rome’s own vices. The text has been called ‘the most dangerous ever written’; it became extremely important for Germans’ later independence from the Roman Catholic Church and more recently, for the Nazis’ pathological ‘German’ nationalism. A high-level operation was mounted by Hitler’s SS to seize the main manuscript of Tacitus’
Germania
from its Italian owners, but fortunately it was frustrated.
⁵

Tacitus was shocked, like many, by the later years of Domitian. It was this experience, not the brusque ‘adoption’ of Trajan, which did most to shape his historical interpretation. His two masterpieces are
the
Histories
, which run from 69 until Domitian’s reign, and then later, the
Annals
, which run from Augustus’ death until Nero’s. Unfortunately, neither has survived intact, but their style, human insight and penetration are the classics of Roman history-writing.

As a ‘new man’ in the Senate, Tacitus’ social views were certainly not liberal. He had no faith in the political wisdom of the mob and no respect, either, for men and women on the make or take. He was similarly prejudiced against Greeks and Jews. He did, however, endorse the inclusive policy of Rome towards its subjects: he revised a speech by the Emperor Claudius so as to make the merits of this inclusion explicit (as a provincial, he had benefited from it). But as a new man at Rome, he liked episodes of old-style robustness, whether in battle or religion or diplomacy. The very form of his
Annals
was old-world: he followed the year-by-year arrangement of the earliest Roman historians, a form which had existed long before the emperors transformed the nature of the state.

Tacitus’ supreme gift is to see the gap between profession and reality and the need for constant distrust of the devious ‘spin’ and professed morality of one-man rule. Tacitus did do research by reading the ‘acts’ of previous senatorial meetings, and perhaps he did it in the spacious rooms of Trajan’s new libraryin Rome. Brilliantly, he appreciated the oratorical style of individual emperors and their eras, while also seeing through the abundant official deceptions and euphemisms about events. The recent find of the inscribed official response of the Senate to events in Tiberius’ family in
AD
20 confirms, in essentials, the penetration of Tacitus’ own version and its mistrust of the clouds of rhetoric around these happenings.

Theoretical constitutions, Tacitus remarks, are hard to realize and very quick to fail. Unlike Cicero, he did not waste time on ideal republics nor did he praise, like Thucydides, a ‘moderate blend’ of opposing classes. There is a wonderfully truculent sarcasm in Tacitus’ judgement. He is not an incurable pessimist, but he is always wry about events and about what their participants were hiding. In him, posterity found the supreme historian of absolute rule, both how to sustain it and how to react to it. For despite Tacitus’ sarcasm and his sense of what had been lost, he was also prepared to serve under a despot (like his friend Pliny). While regretting lost liberty, he advocated
the middle path in politics and hoped that chance or destiny would bring some ruler who might be better than the worst. In the 30s
BC
Sallust had acidly described the Republic’s loss of freedom: Tacitus, heir to Sallust’s style, described the effects of that loss, but not the ways in which to reverse it.

In due course, his stress on liberty and ‘moderate’ accommodation with a ruler intrigued Edward Gibbon and left a profound mark on his
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
: conversely, Tacitus was abhorred by the fraudulent Napoleon. His greatest age of influence was the seventeenth century. He showed readers of that age how to react under despotism and how to cherish a contrary notion of ‘freedom’. He also addressed their concerns about the many court ‘favourites’ whom contemporary rulers in England and Europe were promoting so wantonly. Tacitus had seen both the rulers’ need for favourites and the favourites’ foibles, exemplifying them in his descriptions of Tiberius’ hated Sejanus or Claudius’ assertive freedmen.
⁶
But he also described how despots induce servility, how freedom becomes artful subservience and how justice is distorted by informers and ‘sneaks’. This picture of the Romans’ predicament was powerfully received byEnglish lawyers and political gentlemen when confronted with the vanities of James I and the luxurious demands of his successor, Charles I. At Rome, lawyers had obsequiously found precedents and a context for autocracy; in England, by contrast, lawyers trained in the classics upheld the conception of ‘liberty’ whose loss, they found, had been so poignantly described by Tacitus. And yet Tacitus saw that full liberty was impossible in the existing Roman system and that other values now mattered since the republican days of Cicero’s youth.