Epilogue

If Josephus’ defense of Judaism ever had any merit in Roman eyes, it was soon discredited by the subsequent Jewish uprisings under Trajan and Hadrian. Nor could his notion of all history unrolling as the One God’s will in accordance with holy scripture hold much appeal for gentile readers before the emergence of Christian historiography in the fourth century - a major development (Momigliano 1977: 115-17), but again beyond this chapter’s compass. Recast in less culturally specific terms, the idea that a supreme divinity had predetermined the detailed course of history could hope to chime faintly in some pagan minds - but they were the minds of philosophers, not history writers, and the mood engendered was different from Josephus’. There is an affinity of sorts to be found between the doctrine he ascribes to the Pharisees - ‘‘they hold that to act rightly or otherwise rests mostly with men, but that in every action Fate co-operates’’ - and the Stoics’ idea of divine Providence (BJ2.163; Rajak 1983: 100); in a thoughtful pagan, though, the notion was apt to provoke sentiments on the transience and vanity of human affairs, and a mood leaning closer to Ecclesiastes than the Book of Daniel. To the philosophically-minded emperor Marcus Aurelius, for instance, musing in the mid-second century on his imperial predecessors, it was evident that even the relatively recent past was elusive, rapidly dissolving and already beyond full or certain knowledge:

Think of the times of Vespasian, and what do you see? Men marrying, raising children, falling ill, dying; fighting, feasting, trading, farming; flattering, boasting, suspecting, plotting; cursing, complaining, loving, hoarding; coveting offices, coveting thrones. And now, that life of theirs is no more and nowhere. Come forward to the reign of Trajan, and it is the same; that life too is dead.... The famous names once hymned are now almost archaisms: Camillus, Caeso... Scipio, Cato... even Augustus, and Hadrian, and [my father] Antoninus - everything quickly fades and turns into material for stories, and forgetfulness soon covers it all like sand.... (Med. 4.32-3, abbreviated)

For Marcus in this mood, the past is a halfway house on a road to oblivion in which events are preserved vestigially for a time, as stories sustained by human ingenuity (which is to say, as a ‘‘construction’’). As a Stoic, though, Marcus also knew it was his duty to persevere in his allotted part as a Roman emperor (Med. 3.6), and his reign became golden in later eyes: Cassius Dio in the third century, and Emperor Julian in the fourth, thought Marcus the best emperor that Rome had ever had (Dio 71.34; Jul. Caes. 333c-35d). It is a nice question, what a resurrected Marcus would have thought in return of Rome as it stood in Dio’s or in Julian’s time. In 247/8 ce, 20 years on from the end-point of Dio’s history, the city of Romulus celebrated its thousandth birthday: as one whose own family background lay in Spain, Marcus exemplifies in his way the ‘‘open’’ imperial elite predicted by the Tacitean Claudius (Ann. 11.24), but he might still have been surprised to find that the emperor who presided over the millennial Games was a Syrian ‘‘Arab’’ hailing from the Jebel Druz (Millar 1993a: 530-1). And by the mid-fourth century, change had run much deeper. By that time, Rome was no longer in practice an imperial capital; in the east there was a ‘‘New Rome,’’ Constantinople, and in the west the imperial court had moved to Milan. The emperors residing there, and a good part of the Roman aristocracy, now professed and patronized the Christian religion that Marcus had despised; there was a pope at Rome, and a church of St. Peter on the Vatican. On the other hand, Marcus’ birthday was still being celebrated by annual public games (Beard, Price, and North 1998: 2: 68), and the decorated column his successor had erected to his memory was kept in good repair, along with many other public buildings, by imperial subventions dedicated to the upkeep of the city’s monuments (A. H. M. Jones 1964: 709). And with the emperor away, the aristocracy could play at being Roman senators in a bygone age, disporting themselves in their inscriptions in a style that gave mundane local business a heroic luster: one such aristocrat solves a labor dispute between two trade guilds at Ostia, and earns thanks from both ‘‘for exercising control over distribution of the corn-supply of the Eternal City so fairly as to show himself more a parent than an official’’; another gets an honorific statue for restoring to the Senate a trivial privilege wanting ‘‘since the times of Julius Caesar, 381 years ago’’ (ILS1222, 1272;R. B. E. Smith 2002: 153-5). Moreover, as we noted earlier in connection with Roman travelers in Greece, observers tend to see what they wish to see. That was often the case with fourth-century representations of Rome: the potency of Rome as a symbol and repository of the national past spoke to Christians and pagans alike. The verses inscribed to commemorate a particularly prominent Christian aristocrat can report a public funeral at which ‘‘the highest buildings of Rome appeared to weep’’ (ILCViv, no. 90; Cameron 2002); pagan traditionalists, meanwhile, were compiling potted histories of Rome without a word on its Christians (Momigliano 1977: 121-2), and representing the city in their catalogues of monuments and geographical descriptions without a glance at the Christian architecture springing up there. ‘‘Italy,’’ we read in a description of c.359 ce,

Has the following supreme advantage: the greatest, the most distinguished imperial city, demonstrating its merit in its very name of Rome: they say young Romulus founded it. It is adorned to the greatest extent with buildings worthy of the gods: every earlier emperor, like those of the present time, has wanted to found a building there, and each has created some monument in his own name. If you want [to be reminded of] Antoninus, there are countless monuments of his; [or if Trajan], there is what they call the Forum of Trajan.... [Rome] has a circus, too, well-sited and decorated with many bronzes.... It has the greatest senate composed of rich men, all of whom could be governors - but they prefer to enjoy their wealth in peace. They worship the gods, especially Jupiter and Sol.... (Description of the Whole World 55; Beard, North, and Price 1998: 2: 360)

For the writers and readers of such texts, pagan or Christian, Rome itself was becoming a museum city: we are not far away, here, from the mood in the Procopian image which opened our discussion, with a sixth-century visitor marveling at the sight of Aeneas’ ship, and at the care shown by the Romans to preserve their city’s buildings in the wake of a Gothic occupation. Not even a Gothic king, it would seem, was immune to the spell: in 546 CE, Procopius reports, the Goth Totila had taken the city and was planning to raze it, but was dissuaded by a timely letter brought by ambassadors from Count Belisarius:

‘‘Among all the cities under the sun,’’ the letter began, ‘‘Rome is agreed to be the greatest.... For it has not been created by the ability of one man, nor has it attained such greatness and beauty by a power of short duration. A multitude of kings, many bands of the best men, a long lapse of time and an extraordinary abundance of wealth have brought together in that city all other things that there are in the whole world.... Little by little, they built the city as you see it now, leaving memorials of their excellence to men of future time....’’ (Goth. 7.22.9-12)