There was by this time a paradigm of a good emperor. An adviser to the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Cornelius Fronto, listed his duties as follows: ‘to correct the injustices of the law; to send letters to all parts of the globe; to bring compulsion to bear on kings of foreign nations; to repress by edicts the faults of the provincials, give praise to good actions, quell the seditious and terrify the fierce ones.’
These were pragmatic duties. Much of an emperor’s work lay in the day-to-day management of the tensions between rival generals and governors inevitable in such an enormous empire. The appropriate pressures could only be applied successfully if the emperor radiated auctoritas, an aura of competence, even transcendence. This has to be built up through the demeanour he showed in public. In a panegyric he wrote to the emperor Trajan when selected as consul in ad ioo, Pliny talks of the importance of abstinentia, ‘restraint’. In principle, for instance, the emperor enjoyed absolute power but it was recognized that he should not abuse it. In the tradition established by Augustus, he must maintain the pretence, and by now it was only a pretence, that republican values survived. He should be sensitive to those with ancient privileges, such as senators, and make sure that they, and the equestrians, should have first call on administrative posts. (Claudius offended this class by relying so heavily on freedmen.) He should never lose his self-control. There is a famous account of a much later emperor, Constantius II, visiting Rome for the first time in his life in 357. He was clearly overwhelmed by the experience but onlookers noted how he struggled to keep his amazement to himself. An emotional reaction in public would have been unforgivable.
The ideal emperor is portrayed on a fine set of reliefs of Marcus Aurelius that celebrate his defeat of the German tribes. They date from the late 170s. Three are now displayed in the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome while another eight remain incorporated in the Arch of Constantine in Rome. They cover every aspect of an emperor’s duties. So one shows Marcus Aurelius enjoying a triumph in Rome, in another he is ready to sacrifice at the temple of the Capitoline (the only depiction we have of that temple). On others, he extends clemency to defeated enemies and gives out poor relief. He is seen addressing troops and distributing justice as well as conducting the rituals of sacrifice designated for when leaving a city and when initiating a military campaign. The very quality of these reliefs shows the importance of imperial propaganda, as Augustus, Trajan, and Hadrian had also recognized. The exercise of these duties made up an emperor’s civilitas, his civic virtue.
The army expected the emperor to be ‘one of them, sharing the hardships of campaign and rewarding their victories as appropriate. Pliny praises Trajan for his ability to remember the names of his soldiers, the acts of bravery they had performed, and the wounds they had suffered. While there were exceptions, such as Gaius and Claudius, some form of military command was essential if an emperor was to gain any kind of respect. Gaius may not have cared but Claudius did his best to fabricate the image of conqueror. If the image failed, there were always generals with troops at hand who would take their chance to seize power as Vespasian had in AD 69. From now on, however, following the shift of perspective enjoined by Hadrian, the military challenges would be those of defence, not those of expansion. It could be said that from now on emperors would only fight when they would lose face by not doing so.
The emperor’s name was normally linked to the traditional gods of Rome. In the province of Africa it was common for a temple to the three gods of the Capitol, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, to be inscribed with the name of the emperor as well, and joint dedications to the Divine Augustus (or another emperor) and Rome were common. Gradually the emperor’s name became integrated in all major religious rituals, appropriated as it were as a talisman for the security of the state. By the third century a calendar of festivals celebrated by the garrison at Dura-Europus on the Euphrates, in the far east of the empire, was made up largely of anniversaries of the accessions, deifications, or victories of emperors. (Simon Price, Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor, Cambridge and New York, 1984 is the classic introduction.)
The civil wars of the first century Bc had forced many cities in the Greek east to choose between the rival Roman commanders. Aphrodisias in southern Turkey was especially fortunate. As the name suggests, Aphrodisias was home to an ancient shrine to the goddess of love, Aphrodite, the Roman Venus. Julius Caesar claimed direct descent from Venus and with his victory over Pompey in 48 bc Aphrodisias shamelessly played on its heritage with some success. In return Caesar showed it favours, and, after Caesar’s death, his great-nephew, Octavian, later the emperor Augustus, was ready to receive the homage of the city as one of his own. More imperial patronage followed and, from being a small settlement, Aphrodisias went through a major expansion in the first century ad. It was lucky to have its own supply of marble and the sculptors of Aphrodisias eventually developed an empirewide reputation. (Work of theirs has been found in Rome and Leptis Magna.)
The Sebasteion was commissioned by two local families in honour of the Roman emperor as Sebastos, ‘saviour’. It was begun during the reign of Augustus’ successor, Tiberius, partially rebuilt following an earthquake in the reign of Claudius, and probably finished in the early years of the reign of Nero (ad 50s). These emperors were all descendants of the Julio-Claudian family and so this was an offering to them, a continuation of the Hellenistic cults of earlier centuries but now in a completely different context, that of a Mediterranean-wide empire ruled from the west.
The monument consisted of an entrance gateway, an enclosed processional way 90 metres long with columns leading up to a temple at the end. Greek temples normally stood within a large enclosure, the temenos, with an altar in front of them. A colonnade leading up to a temple was more typical of the Roman imperial fora, the large ceremonial monuments that the emperors created for their self-glorification in Rome. Those of Julius Caesar and Augustus in Rome had similar arrangements and would have been complete before building of the Sebasteion began. As neither of the donor families (in each case we have the names of two brothers) appears to be Roman, they, or their architect, must have visited Rome for inspiration. It is an excellent example of the new cultural interchanges between the Latin west and Greek east that followed the reign of Augustus.
The most spectacular feature of the Sebasteion is the 180 reliefs that were placed on the walls of the colonnade. When the building eventually collapsed in an earthquake they fell face downwards in the soil and so many were preserved. (These are
Now displayed in a fine new gallery at Aphrodisias.) The reliefs cover an extraordinary range of ‘imperial’ themes but the predominant one is compromise and collaboration, an integration of Greek and Roman cultures with the Greek city of Aphrodisias welcoming Roman rule. The emperors are shown as semi-divine alongside a presentation of the imperial family as protectors of a Mediterranean-wide empire against the barbarians. So images of conquest, prosperity, and benevolent rule predominate. The Greeks, the monument assumes, are collaborators in this in that the emperors are now integrated within Greek mythology, especially that of the Olympian gods who figure prominently on the reliefs.
Those Roman emperors who had died before the reliefs were carved are presented nude reflecting their heroic status as gods. They are venerated as victors. So Claudius is shown as conqueror of Britannia who is personified as a woman captive submitting to him. (In reality, as seen earlier, pp. 474-5, he had only taken the submission of the British tribes after his generals had defeated them.) Again Nero presents himself, or is represented, on the reliefs as the victor over Armenia although the Armenians were powerful enough to maintain their independence. Yet the emperors are also bringers of peace. The reliefs depicting Augustus display him as much as a ruler of settled land and safe seas as of conquered barbarians.
Perhaps the most absorbing, and certainly the most technically accomplished of the reliefs (as if it were designed as a show-piece) shows the emperor Nero being crowned by his mother Agrippina. Agrippina was a great-granddaughter of Augustus and niece of the emperor Claudius whom she married as his fourth wife, so bringing her son Nero into the heart of the imperial family. It is the only imperial relief from the Aphrodisias sequence in which an emperor is shown clothed, in military dress. Yet Nero’s shoes are in the distinct style worn by senators so here military and civilian are being cleverly combined. Agrippina holds a large cornucopia, the symbol of fertility associated with successful imperial rule, in her left hand. Then there was embarrassment. News must have filtered through of Nero’s murder of his mother and his damnatio by the senate after his death. The relief had to be taken down and was found buried as a pavement slab. Another portrayal of Nero on the reliefs was defaced.
Close to the reliefs of the emperors are those of the gods. The hero/god Heracles, often a symbol of powerful leadership, appears in six reliefs, Dionysus, the god of wine and abandon, is shown in five. Then there are three reliefs of Apollo, one of them linking him to his oracle site at Delphi. Many other traditional mythological themes appear, Leda and the Swan, Centaurs and Lapiths, Ajax and Cassandra from the siege of Troy, among them. What is shown here is the conventional repertoire of Greek mythology with the emperors linked to it to reflect their own divine status (more easily acceptable in the Greek east). However, a cluster of reliefs from the eastern end of the southern colonnade tie the Sebasteion more tightly to the Romans and, specifically, to the family of Caesar. So the founding of Rome is signalled by a relief of Aeneas fleeing from Troy on his way to Italy and there is one of Romulus and Remus with their wolf. Naturally there is a relief of Aphrodite, here giving birth to Eros, while another relief shows the personification of a city, undoubtedly Aph-rodisias, being crowned by a personification of Rome herself.
Then there are representations of conquered barbarians, the ethne—all of whom seem to be tribes or nations conquered by Augustus. There are thirteen of them, as well as three islands, Sicily, Crete, and Cyprus. All are personified as statuesque female figures in bold relief, originally with inscriptions of their provenance on a pedestal below them. The geographical spread is from east to west to show how the emperor had defended all the borders, however far flung. So in the far west are the Callaeci of northern Spain, there are several ethne from across the Alps and along the Danube, and even a tribe of Bospori on the Black Sea. In the far eastern Mediterranean the Judaei, Arabi, and Aegyptii are recorded. These reliefs provide a survey of the sheer diversity of cultures that the Romans had conquered.
In its full glory the Sebasteion must have been a stunning complex to visit. Above all it shows the impact of new relationships that were being forged. The people of Aphrodisias were given a powerful narrative of the empire to which they now belonged, its extent, its rulers, and its mythologies. It worked. Over the next hundred years most of the antagonisms between rival cities in Asia Minor had abated and they were concentrating on magnificent display. Aphrodisias, whose stadium is the largest in the Greek world and still in good condition, was among the most prosperous. (See further Chapter 29.)
World History
