History of Western Civilisation - Tuesday 7th Period: Lecture 6: The Roman Empire

[prof-methos.livejournal.com]

Now have some patience: the lecture today is a bit on the long side, but it also has some of the best trashy stories you'll find outside of a soap opera.

In the last class we mentioned Augustus Caesar establishing himself as Emperor in 31 BCE, officially ending the Roman Republic.

While Augustus was the first to style himself emperor, Rome and the empire that had already started under the Republic had been in political upheaval for most of a century. By this time little of the old Republic actually remained as anything more than a historical ideal. But never underestimate the power of a name. This ideal was such an important part of Roman thinking that Augustus actually declared that he had simply "restored the Republic" -- with the small addition of himself as ruler for life in charge of all the military, several whole provinces, and the entire city of Rome itself. See? No worries, right?

However, by maintaining this fiction of the "Restored Republic" during a long reign of peace, expansion, and prosperity, Augustus was in fact able to firmly establish the position of emperor as one of uncontested power. During his nearly 60 years in power, Augustus also formalized the military as a professional organization (under his control), expanded the Empire to include most of the territory Rome would ever manage to rule (under his control), and created an extensive government civil service structure that answered, not to the increasingly helpless Senate, but to -- you guessed it -- the emperor himself.

The Augustan period saw a tremendous outpouring of cultural achievement in the areas of poetry, history, sculpture and architecture. At the same time there was a tremendous outpouring of energy in founding colonies and cities to Romanize the newly conquered territories. Augustus also started the tradition of declaring all emperors gods after their deaths -- a tradition that remained wildly popular among all later emperors.

While Augustus was a firm champion of what today might be called "family values", when he finally died his title and power passed to his step-son Tiberius, beginning a run of far less successful and far more decadent emperors. None of these subsequent emperors made anywhere near Augustus' mark on Rome -- militarily, politically, or culturally. However, they did have a lot of fun with the concept of "absolute power" and seeing just how absolutely they could be corrupted by it.

Tiberius's reign quickly became characterized by paranoia and slander. He was popularly suspected of murdering his very popular nephew as well as his own son. Tiberius' P.R. wasn't exactly improved when he started a series of treason trials and executions, and then left his guard commander Sejanus to enthusiastically continue them while Tiberius himself retired to live in seclusion with a whole bunch of under-age boy-toys in Capri.

By the time Tiberius died most people who could have succeeded him had been killed off (including, ironically, Sejanus), leaving only his personal choice, his grandnephew Caligula. Incidentally, there is a good deal of evidence that Caligula began his own reign by smothering old man Tiberius in his villa with a pillow. And that was when he was still sane.

Shortly into his reign Caligula suffered from a severe illness (often thought now to have been encephalitis or epilepsy) and recovered, but at the cost of his sanity. His most famous 'idiosyncrasies' included marching to invade Britain in order to fight the Sea God Neptune, then changing his mind at the last minute, declaring himself the winner, and having his soldiers pick up hundreds of sea shells from the beaches in Northern France as his "spoils of war". He also slept with his sisters, with the apparent intent of starting a divine, Egyptian-like dynasty, and was particularly fond of having people secretly killed and then joking that they'd committed suicide when they didn't show up to his summons.

In 41 CE everyone had had enough, and Caligula was assassinated by the commander of his own private guard. The same private guard grabbed the only male member of the imperial family no one had bothered to kill yet -- Caligula's much-mocked bookworm of an uncle Claudius -- and declared him emperor.

Claudius, being sane and relatively bright, actually made a pretty good emperor, cleaning up a lot of the empire's administration and bureaucracy, building a port at Ostia so that grain could be brought into the city both in summer and winter, and adding Britain and several Eastern provinces to the empire. His first wife however, cheated on him very publicly, causing him to execute her and marry his niece. His second wife ran roughshod over him, eventually poisoning him in order to put her sixteen-year-old son from her first marriage, Nero, on the imperial throne.

Nero started out leaving the empire in the hands of his mother and tutors, preferring to style himself a athlete, musician, and actor -- a profession with about the same amount of respectability as prostitution at the time. Oddly enough Nero, sole ruler of the known world, never lost a single contest in any field. Funny, that. His unbroken winning streak was, nevertheless, an accomplishment Nero took great pride in.

Eventually the family tendency towards (arguably justified) paranoia caused him to execute his mother and tutors. Nero's basic incompetence as a ruler quickly became all too clear as a series of major riots and rebellions broke out throughout the Empire. In 68 his own guard renounced him and he committed suicide.

One of Rome's greatest problems had become its need to continually defend against two hostile borders -- the 'barbarian' Germanic tribes in the west, and the Parthian Empire in the east. To make things worse, a tendency developed for the generals in these frontier areas to take the large amount of loyal troops they commanded and rebel, starting regular civil wars in an attempt to gain their own empires. The biggest problem was that on occasion this actually worked, and several later Roman emperors actually got their start as rebellious frontier generals.

With none of the original imperial family left to succeed Nero, civil war indeed broke out and the year 69 CE became known as the "Year of The Four Emperors" as various generals battled each other for the throne. Emperor number four, the general Vespasian, by holding hostage the annual winter shipment of grain to Rome from Alexandria, managed to make his rule stick and a new imperial family was founded.

Vespasian and his two sons who followed him as emperor helped restore stability to an empire on its knees. However at the same time they pretty much abandoned all pretense of allowing the Senate any power. New taxes and careful management helped re-establish a treasury ruined by the excesses of previous emperors, funded public works projects (including the Colosseum), rebuilt an army decimated by civil war, and also provided subsidies to the arts.

Titus followed in his father's footsteps in running a stable empire, however he died fairly young, and by the end of his reign his younger brother Domitian relapsed into the kind of paranoia, arrests, and executions we saw during the decline of the previous imperial family. Like the predecessors he was emulating, Domitan was also eventually murdered, in his case by a joint effort of his political enemies and his wife.

This time civil war was avoided and the next century came to be known as the period of the "Five Good Emperors", in which the succession was peaceful and the Empire was prosperous. One of the reasons for this peace was that, having no natural heirs, each emperor simply adopted and groomed his own, hand-picked successor while he was still alive.

Then Good Emperor number five, Marcus Aurelius -- an all around good guy and a capable emperor -- made the mistake of having a son and passing the empire directly to him. Commodius was pretty much insane from the start, insisting on renaming the city of Rome, the Senate, and every month of the calendar after himself. He also liked to dress up and play gladiator in the arena, an appallingly inappropriate thing for an emperor to do whether you're facing down Russell Crowe or not.

Following the established tradition of blood relations, lunacy, paranoia, terrible government, and public embarrassment to its logical conclusion, Commodius was eventually strangled in his bed.

Next came the five emperors of the Severan dynasty. Originating from a political alliance between the provinces of Syria and North Africa, the second emperor in this dynasty removed all legal and political distinction between Italians and provincials, extending full Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire. However, as seems to happen, emperor number two eventually became more and more unstable, and his successors were little better. After the death of Number five, once again civil war broke out, this time lasting half a century.

Diocletian finally managed to re-establish solid rule of a very battered empire. Deciding that no single emperor could manage the entire empire, including both rebellious frontiers, Diocletian split the empire in half just east of Italy, giving the new co-emperor position of the eastern empire to his long-time friend Maximian. The western empire would collapse less than 200 years later, while the eastern empire would become the Byzantine Empire, centered at Constantinople, and would survive another thousand years.

Reality was not so neat, however, and a period of more civil war -- and up to five self-proclaimed emperors at a time -- was only brought back under control by Constantine. This emperor was known primarily for two things, establishing Byzantium (or Constantinople, "Constantine's City") as the seat of the eastern empire, and embracing Christianity as the state religion. Of course the Christians, who hadn't been actively persecuted for some time at this point, promptly turned around and started persecuting the pagans.

Constantine's three sons divvied up the empire, two splitting the west and another in the east. One of sons ruling the west killed his brother, and was in turn killed by an ambitious general. Constantius, who was still in charge in the east took back power in the west, but only after another round of civil wars.

Constantius' son Julian ended the persecution of the pagans, and reinstated the (unofficial) persecution of Christians. His successor, an obscure general named Jovian promptly reversed this stand once again.

Now I could make you sit through the endless succession of obscure generals and random relatives who served as emperors for the next hundred years, but considering none of them did much except fight amongst themselves, we're going to just skip them entirely. Suffice it to say that, while occasionally combined -- and always considering themselves equally Roman -- the two halves of the empire remained largely separate political entities during this time, with the infighting always particularly heavy in the west.

The year 476 AD is generally given as the end of the Western Roman Empire, that being the year that the Germanic Chieftain Odoacer deposed his puppet Romulus Augustus, and for the first time did not bother to induct a successor.

Next class: The Byzantine Empire, also known as The Half Of Rome That Didn't Fall For Another Thousand Years, But Was In Asia and Thus Is Usually Ignored.


((OOC: Today's monster lecture is once again cribbed from Wikipedia by aka_vala. Hopefully it was at least somewhat entertaining. From now on the Roomie-muns swap out areas of expertise and prof_methos will actually be doing his own lectures. His are usually much shorter. Be grateful. ;) --Vala-mun))

[[OOC: OCD threads are coming up!!]]