Download PDF | (The Routledge History of the Ancient World) Martin Goodman - The Roman World 44 BCAD 180 (The Routledge History of the Ancient World)-Routledge (1997).
405 Pages
PREFACE
I have approached with appropriate trepidation the task of trying to encapsulate in a short book the great wealth of scholarship and novel evidence published by historians of the Early Roman Empire over recent years. I am well aware that the result is necessarily unsatisfactory. My excuse for making the attempt at all is that this synthesis may have a somewhat different perspective from that found in the standard textbooks. In addition, I confess that I have enjoyed the opportunity to set down ideas which have cropped up in teaching over the past twenty years both in Birmingham and in Oxford.
I should begin by thanking the many undergraduates who have questioned my wilder suggestions and whose own insights I have over the years incorporated into my own picture of the Roman world in this period. In order to discuss the whole Roman world within the compass prescribed by the series of the Routledge History of the Ancient World, I began work on the book in 1991 not by collecting material but by taking quite literally the advice of Fergus Millar simply to write down the history of the Early Empire as I saw it.
The resulting scribble was transferred by me onto tapes, which were transcribed into print with extraordinary patience by Emma-Jayne Muir during 1992. During the spring and summer of 1993 I tried to fill in the more blatant gaps in my knowledge. My work on the typescript was my major occupation during my tenure of a Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I am extremely grateful to the Institute for the exemplary hospitality I was shown and to Aharon Oppenheimer and Isaiah Gafni, the leaders of the group to which I was attached, for the invitation to join them.
The typescript thus amplified was complete by the summer of 1994. I had intended to correct and check the text during 1995 and 1996 but was forestalled by my appointment from October 1995 as Acting President of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies during the search for a new President. As recompense for my near total absorption in the administration of the Centre, the Governors of the Centre agreed to appoint Jane Sherwood as a research assistant for the academic year 1995–6 to help me to continue my research.
She made the preparation for publication of the typescript of this book her main task. That task was huge. Jane checked every assertion and reference in the text. All too often my most interesting and novel assertions turned out to be simple errors or based on evidence I can no longer recall. Her gentle scepticism was salutary but sobering. The book has been incalculably improved by her scrupulous efforts. The reader will notice a marked bias towards evidence written by or about Jews in the Roman Empire. I do not apologise for this.
The emphasis reflects of course my own area of greatest interest, but I also believe that it serves a more general purpose. In many histories of the Roman world the Jews are given barely a mention; conversely, accounts of Jewish history and of early Christianity rarely give the reader much impression of the Roman environment within which these histories took shape. I hope that the perspective of this book may provide a gentle corrective. For those subjects about which I am most ignorant I have shamelessly plundered the standard reference works, not least The Oxford Classical Dictionary and the new edition of The Cambridge Ancient History.
I make no pretence to have mastered the primary evidence in all the multifarious topics to which the book refers, but I have tried to indicate to the reader what sort of evidence exists and where it can be found, and the difficulties involved in its use. I hope to have given the flavour of the evidence by the inclusion of sufficient illustrative quotations, for which I have had frequent recourse to the fine collections of primary evidence described in the Bibliographical Notes. If this book can encourage readers to make intelligent use of such sourcebooks, one of my aims will have been achieved. It has been tempting, since I am surrounded in Oxford by colleagues expert in so many of the aspects of the Roman world about which I am incompetent, to ask one of them to read and advise on every chapter of the book.
I have restrained myself from doing this too much, in part because it is simply not fair to impose such a burden on others, but also because real experts are sometimes so horrified by the compression of complex issues necessary in a book like this that I might find myself expanding the typescript beyond all bounds. I am none the less grateful to Alan Bowman, Andrew Poulter, Michael Sharp and Andrew Wilson, who have commented on individual chapters. I am also grateful to Chris Howgego for his help in selecting suitable coin illustrations and to Michael Vickers for help in choosing other objects from the collection in the Ashmolean Museum. The maps and city plan have been expertly prepared by Alison Wilkins. It hardly needs saying that the book owes most to two others. Fergus Millar made numerous suggestions, small and large, on the whole typescript in its first draft.
Above all, Jane Sherwood has toiled with extraordinary good humour for a whole year, discovering apposite quotations, altering mis-remembered apophthegms, reshaping the boring passages which looked (all too accurately) as if they had been culled from reference works. Her brief was to revise the manuscript as if she were the author. She fulfilled that brief to perfection, and if she appears on the title page in the role of assistant rather than joint author, that is only because responsibility for the overall design and emphasis of the book, with all its imperfections, rests with me. This is not the first book in which I have thanked my family for their forbearance, but I do so this time with particular gratitude for their patience during my six months away from home in Jerusalem in 1993 and my frequent absences while I was fully engaged in the administration of the Hebrew Centre. Hence the dedication to my wife, Sarah, on our twentieth wedding anniversary. Martin Goodman 19 October 1996.
INTRODUCTION
SOURCES AND PROBLEMS The Roman world from the middle of the first century BC to the end of the second century AD witnessed, after traumatic upheavals, the establishment of a stable society over one of the widest geographical areas to know political unity at any time in human history. From the achievements, ethos and writings of the Roman Empire at its height stemmed the values—moral, religious, artistic, legal, political—which have shaped European culture down to the twentieth century. In some respects such influence has been continuous over the last 2,000 years. Christianity, which sprang from Judaism in the early first century, and rabbinic Judaism which emerged from the traumas of the end of that century, evolved in an unbroken tradition through the Middle Ages. So too did the medical achievements of the High Empire, to the extent that the speculations of Galen (AD 129–c. 199) about the workings of the body remained standard theory until the eighteenth century. So also did the astronomy and astrology of Claudius Ptolemaeus (AD c. 100–c. 178) and the work of the Classical Roman jurists, whose textbooks, written in the mid- to late second century AD, provided the foundation of Late Roman and then medieval law codes. German law is based on their categories to this day. Other achievements were forgotten until the Renaissance, when the rediscovery of Plutarch (AD c. 46–c. 120) and the philosophical discussions of the elder Seneca (c. 55 BC–C. AD 40) and others set standards and tone for civilized morality, while a burgeoning awareness of the architecture of the grand buildings erected in the High Empire stimulated the neo-classicism of Renaissance architecture. The industriousness of Greek scholars of the second century AD ensured that the works through which the Early Modern world came to know about and love Classical Greece were themselves products of the Roman world (Plutarch, Appian, Arrian above all). To understand the evolution of the Early Roman Empire is thus to comprehend the foundations of our own society. It is not, as will be seen, an entirely easy task to achieve. For Edward Gibbon in the late eighteenth century the beginning of the Roman Empire saw the establishment after violent conflict of a balanced constitution, which under enlightened emperors led inevitably to the peace and security of the second century AD: If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.1 This judgement directly reflects the views of the narrative sources of political history on which Gibbon based his account. For the Roman senator Pliny (AD 61–c. 112), writing in the early second century AD, the despotic tendencies of early emperors had given way to the just and beneficent rule of Trajan. A similarly kindly filter has coloured posterity’s view of subsequent emperors down to, but not including, the monster Commodus (sole ruler AD 180–92). But a history of the Roman world must be more than an account of the finer feelings of its governing élite and literati. The mass of humanity of all classes, ethnic backgrounds and cultural affiliations, and of both sexes, cannot be assumed to have concurred with the view of a Roman senator. Was the second century AD for them too an age in which it was good to be alive? And if not, why not?
THE EVIDENCE
The problem in answering such a question lies, as always in the study of ancient history, in the selective nature of the evidence. The narrative histories of the political events of the period were composed by Roman senators— Velleius Paterculus (c. 20 BC–after AD 30), Tacitus (AD c. 56–c. 120), Cassius Dio (AD c. 163/4–c. 230)—whose stance close to, but not quite in, the centre of state power engendered an idiosyncratic, often jaundiced view, which was compounded by the requirement of the historiographical genre to concentrate on the military efforts of the state, and overt political action by the ruling class, rather than on economic or social developments or the hidden, unspoken wielding of power by emperors. The genre of emperors’ biographies effectively invented by Suetonius (AD c. 69–after 122), who had the advantage of working in the imperial household, provides something of a corrective in the latter field. But Suetonius’ reliance on unchecked anecdotes, and his concern for the personal characteristics of emperors more than for their relations with their subjects, somewhat limit the usefulness of his work. The Augustan History (Scriptores Historiae Augustae), a collection of the biographies of emperors stretching from Hadrian to the late third century AD, is even less reliable. Similar in style and organization to Suetonius’ lives, these biographies descend into obvious fantasy and forgery in some of the third-century lives. The most likely explanation of the origins of the work is that, despite the pretence of multiple authorship, it was produced in the late fourth century by a single individual with a strong (if peculiar) sense of humour which developed as he proceeded chronologically with the composi-tion of the biographies. In that case, the biographies of Hadrian and of the Antonines can be considered among the most reliable in the collection, since the author could rely on plentiful data, and had not yet developed the tendencies which make the later lives unusable; but no uncorroborated statement found in any of the biographies can be used without caution. For the most part, information must be culled from less direct sources than historical or biographical narratives. From the governing class in Rome there survives a mass of evidence which was preserved for its literary merit. For the beginning of the period, the last letters of Cicero (106–43 BC) and his passionate speeches against Antonius (the Philippics) provide an unparalleled insight into the attitudes and assumptions of one, rather idiosyncratic, politician. The other collections of letters which survive, the Moral Letters of Seneca, the letters of the younger Pliny, and the pedantic correspondence with his imperial pupils of the rhetorician Fronto (AD c. 100–166/7) offer many insights into the social and ethical assumptions of élite Roman society, but, since they were composed for publication, they lack the immediacy of Cicero. A cultural efflorescence under Augustus produced much poetry in Latin, the so-called ‘Golden Age’, while the steady stream of poets in the first century AD welled up into a second flood at the end of the first century and early second century AD, the ‘Silver Age’. The origins of most Latin poetry in imitation and adaptation of Greek genres preclude use of such writings as if they described their own society directly, but frequent hints can none the less be culled about contemporary affairs; in this respect, the Latin genre of satire, in which contemporary morals are mocked, is particularly illuminating (thus Horace (65–8 BC) and especially Juvenal (AD c. 60–after 127)). Much too can be learnt from the compendious scholarship of gentlemen academics, which had become fashionable in the Late Republic: the antiquarian musings of Terentius Varro (116–27 BC) and the massive compilation of the elder Pliny (AD 23/4– 79), his Natural History, contain numerous nuggets of information among the verbose speculation of the learned. It would then be possible to compose a history simply of the upper class in the city of Rome. But it would be quite wrong to view developments among this privileged group as normal for the rest of the emperors’ subjects. Little literary evidence survives from the western (Latin-speaking) part of the empire outside Rome in this period. Latin writers gravitated to the capital in search of patronage. An honourable exception was Apuleius (AD c. 125–after 160s), a citizen of Madaura in North Africa, whose novel, The Golden Ass, gives an instructive insight into provincial life as viewed by a man on the fringes of the urban élite. But from the Greek-speaking East survives a mass of literary evidence which rivals the Latin compositions in Rome in quantity if not always in quality. Some of these authors also wrote in Rome, from the composers of Greek epigrams for Augustus, to Plutarch (in c. AD 92–3) and the rather greater numbers attracted by the philhellenic policy of Hadrian in the 120s AD (see Chapters 7 and 23). But many, like Pausanias (AD c. 115–c.180), were content to stay in Greece itself or Asia Minor, reflecting the cultural selfabsorption of those areas. Only one such author composed a history of his own region in his own time, the Jewish writer Josephus (AD c. 37/8–after 93), whose accounts of the Jewish war of AD 66–70, and the history of the Jews to AD 66 in his Antiquities of the Jews, provide a unique insight into the nature of Roman rule as viewed from below. Much of the rest of the Greek literature of the imperial period was concerned with the remote Classical past before Alexander the Great. This fact is in itself an important cultural phenomenon, but it restricts the usefulness of these writings in reconstructing the history of their own times. The exceptions are few: Dio Chrysostom, rhetorician and philosopher (AD c. 40–after 112), whose moral discourses sometimes infringed on contemporary events, or the rather more rigorous Stoic-Cynic Epictetus (AD c. 55–c. 135). These disparate and disjointed literary sources for life outside Rome are amplified and corrected by an extraordinary mass of physical evidence, from the strictly archaeological to inscriptions on stone, metals and wood, the written records of papyri, and coins. The accumulated effect of such evidence may give the impression of a society which can be known in detail, particularly in contrast to the preceding and following periods, but the peculiar nature of this evidence and the biases inherent in it also need to be acknowledged.3 The frequency with which evidence for the early imperial period is reported from archaeological sites is to a large extent a function of the ease with which it can be recognized. That in turn means that only certain kinds of evidence will usually be spotted. Thus Roman villas, town plans, public buildings and roads of this period may be recovered with comparative ease because of the regularity of their construction over much of the empire and the durability of buildings constructed in stone rather than wood or other perishable materials. The wide circulation of the artefact least subject to decay, that is, pottery, enables archaeologists to correlate different areas with comparative ease, but again, only fine wares travelled far, so that the relations of poorer people are less easy to fathom. The reconstruction of settlement patterns and life-styles of peasants can indeed be recovered from archaeological evidence, but only with great and painstaking care. A similar bias towards the better-off prejudices use of the million or so inscriptions on stone which are currently known to survive from the Roman period.4 Most of these can be dated to Roman imperial times, and together they provide multifarious details of the careers and family relations of individuals, the deployment of military units, and the relations between cities and between subject and emperor. The ‘epigraphic habit’ is a rather strange one. Cutting letters on stone requires a mason skilled in the traditional craft. The custom did not catch on in all areas of the empire, and for reasons of expense never became common among those whose wealth fell below that of the better-off artisans, although some ex-slaves were prepared to pay to commemorate their freedom. It was thus an urban phenomenon. In thecountryside peasants could rarely afford the luxury, and only soldiers who were eager to perpetuate their memory, and were quite well paid, erected permanent monuments. In our society the fashion survives primarily in the commissioning of grave markers. Writing on more perishable materials has survived in the last 2,000 years only through exceptional climatic conditions or by unusual chance. Papyri survive in great numbers from Roman Egypt and reveal much about small town life and the state’s bureaucracy. The peculiar society and administration of Egypt (see Chapter 27) enable this evidence to be applied to the rest of the empire only with caution. Similar care is needed in assessing the significance of evidence of social strains. Many of the papyri survived because the land in which they were buried has not been inundated since antiquity. By definition, then, they derive from caches outside or on the fringes of the land cultivable from irrigation from the River Nile. The communities who lived on such marginal land may have been more susceptible to fluctuation in climate or in state demands than others in the empire. Some, but fewer, papyri survive from the Near East, especially from the Judaean desert, throwing some light on the history of Judaea and Arabia. Inscriptions on wooden slats have been discovered in the excavations of the Roman fort of Vindolanda on Hadrian’s wall; it can confidently be assumed that more will appear in excavations elsewhere in the western provinces now that archaeologists know what they are looking for.5 Evidence of coins can be used in a variety of ways to reconstruct history.6 On the one hand, the inscriptions and types can be presumed to reflect a propaganda message intended by the state to influence its subjects. Whether such propaganda was very successful is unclear, but that is another matter.
On the other hand, economic historians can learn much about the circulation of coinage by analysing the distribution of the places where coins of a particular issue are found; such information is especially useful when the coins are discovered as spot finds, since such individual coins will have survived in the archaeological record only because they were dropped by accident, and that in turn reveals that such coins must have been generally carried for purposes of exchange. In contrast, the discovery of deliberate hoards may be evidence of political turmoil; at the least it can be assumed that some factor prevented the hoarder from recovering his or her treasure. In all this mass of evidence a crucial question and a source of continuing conflicting interpretations is how much to take at face value.
What is involved must be not just the collection and collation of evidence, but an attempt, with sympathy but without uncritical acceptance of ancient evaluations, to interpret that evidence in a framework of a plausible model of how the Roman Empire might have worked. It cannot be stressed too emphatically that the only certain fact about the ancient world is that most information about it has been lost. What survives does so mostly through the preferences and prejudices of those—mostly Christian monks—who in Late Antiquity and through the Middle Ages copied the manuscripts on which our texts are based. Imagination and empathy are essential to achieve even a glimpse of the lives of people long dead. Thus, all historians accept that attempted reconstructions of the past can never be allowed to ignore or contradict the surviving evidence without at least plausible justification for such a procedure, but it is equally misleading to allow credence only to those statements about the past for which direct evidence happens to survive.
Roman history has for centuries suffered from an antiquarian approach in which footnotes and citation have come to seem ends in themselves. Such historiography may reflect more the vagaries of literary survival and archaeological discoveries than the world of the Romans themselves. It is preferable to attempt to imagine a rounded picture of Roman society into which all the evidence can coherently be fitted. The choice of the framework for that picture will, of course, inevitably reflect the taste and prejudices of the historian, and sometimes imagination will lead one astray. At any time new evidence may shift perceptions. This is a matter not for regret but for rejoicing. The historian’s task is never finished.
FROM CITY TO EMPIRE
With the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC the Roman aristocracy was thrown into a chaos from which it only emerged in 31 BC with the victory of Octavian, who, under the name Augustus, set the pattern for future government of the Roman world by a sole ruler. The struggle in which Augustus had been involved had nominally been over the right to honours and magistracies in the city of Rome, but the arena for the contest was the whole area that had been conquered by Rome over the preceding three centuries. Armies marched through Italy, and fought in most of the countries bordering the Mediterranean from Spain to Egypt.
In an age of slow communications the cause of their tribulations must have been quite obscure to many of the provincials whose taxes and forced labour enabled great Roman aristocrats to fight out the Roman revolution. Hence the approach by the people of Aphrodisias in Turkey to Octavian in c. 38 BC, even though their territory did not lie in the region controlled by him. According to an inscription preserved at Aphrodisias, Octavian wrote to the neighbouring city of Ephesus. Solon son of Demetrius, envoy of Plarasa-Aphrodisias, has reported to me…how much property both public and private was looted, concerning all of which I have given a mandate to my colleague [Marcus] Antonius that, as far as possible, he should restore to them whatever he finds. (Reynolds, no. 12; LR 1, p. 327)
For such desperate provincials, Rome was a distant ruthless power and the machinations of her leaders belonged to a different world. Any help from any powerful individual was to be seized on. By AD 180 much of this had changed. The Roman world was for the most part at peace, and it was many years since aspirants to power had upset the status quo (although civil war was to erupt again in AD 193 on the murder of Commodus). But in any case, for many provincials of the urban aristocracy Rome had ceased to appear alien and hostile.
Partly this was as a result of the grant of Roman citizenship to increasing numbers: in AD 212 it was to become quasi-universal. Partly it was encouraged by the openness of the Roman upper class to rich provincials who wished to devote their lives to participation in the state’s bureaucracy. But above all it was a product of the main change which gives the period its name. What united the 50 to 60 million or so inhabitants of the empire, whether they were scions of old Roman noble families or the humblest Syrian peasant, was simply this: that all were ruled by one man, the supreme autocrat, the emperor.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق