As Tacitus acknowledged, the Roman empire had been won and, in the last resort, was held by force. Control was not imposed easily. Spain suffered nearly 200 years of campaigning before it was finally subdued and even provinces that appeared peaceful might still rise in revolt. An example was the great rebellion in Judaea in 66 Bc which began with the massacre of a Roman garrison in Caesarea and then spread to the whole of Palestine. It was fuelled by the strong sense of national identity preserved by the Jews and by tensions between rich and poor. By the time Jerusalem was stormed by Titus in 70 the Romans may have inflicted a million casualties. Those insurgents who were captured alive were distributed as victims to the amphitheatres of the east (600 of the fittest were reserved for Rome) and the treasures of the Temple carried off as booty. (Some of them, including the great candelabrum, can still be seen portrayed on the triumphal arch of Titus in Rome.) Lingering resistance in the mountain fortress of Masada continued until 74 when, according to the historian Josephus, its last defenders committed mass suicide. Around the fortress the remains of a carefully built ramp and a ring of army camps still show the methodical and determined approach of the Romans to warfare and suppression of revolt. A second Jewish revolt in 132-5 was crushed with equal brutality. Confronted by some squabbling Greek cities in the early second century ad, the philosopher Plutarch reminded them of ‘the boots of the Roman soldiers poised over their heads’
The suppression of the Jewish revolts showed that the earlier traditions of ruthlessness were not dead. Officially the day-to-day administration of the empire was less brutal. The process of punishment was regulated and restrained by law. In the provinces the governor alone had the right to pass a capital sentence, while citizens maintained the right to appeal to the emperor, in his role as tribune, in Rome. So Caiaphas, the High Priest, had to persuade Pontius Pilate to order the crucifixion of Jesus and Paul exercised his right as a Roman citizen to appeal to the emperor and so was shipped to Rome. However, all the evidence suggests that violence was routine in the conduct of the administration. Suetonius’ and Tacitus’ histories preserve the memory of the megalomanic behaviour of Caligula and Nero against their subjects, and the lives of Tiberius and Domitian also ended in reigns of terror. Non-citizens had no protection against the arbitrary decisions of magistrates and there is evidence that governors would order executions to appease local pressure groups (the trial and crucifixion of Jesus on the authority of Pontius Pilate can be viewed in this context) or simply to clear overcrowded gaols. (David Mattingley, Imperialism, Power and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire, Princeton and London, 2010 is a study that suggests that Roman rule, especially in the west, has been too idealized.)
Capital punishment was used not only to eliminate undesirables but to act as an example to others. Crucifixions provided a slow death in public. The execution of criminals was institutionalized as public display on a far greater scale in the arena. Seneca visited the amphitheatre one day just as the latest crop of criminals was being dealt with:
All niceties were put aside, and it was pure and simple murder. The combatants have absolutely no protection. Their whole bodies are exposed to one another’s blows and thus each never fails to injure his opponent. Most people in the audience prefer this type of match to the regular gladiators. The spectators demand that combatants who have killed their opponents be thrown to combatants who will in turn kill them, and they make a victor stay for another slaughter. For every combatant, therefore, the outcome is certain death. (Translation: Jo-Ann Shelton)
The use of terror as example was deeply embedded in the Roman mind. Like most societies of the ancient world Rome was very brutal, but the brutality was carried out with more efficiency than in most. In the original conquests of the empire one defiant city was often singled out for particularly harsh treatment in an attempt to cow the rest into quick submission. The same procedure was used to keep order at home. When a slave murdered his master, for instance, it was the custom to execute all the other slaves in the household. In ad 61 the wealthy City Prefect Lucius Pedanius Secundus was murdered by one of his slaves. He had 400 altogether and once news spread that all of them, including women and children, were to be put to death crowds gathered to protest. The matter was debated in the senate. The depth and rigidity of Roman conservatism can be seen in the speech of Gaius Cassius Longinus, quoted by Tacitus:
When wiser men have in past times considered and settled the whole matter, do you dare to contradict them? . . . Intimidation is the only way to keep down this scum. You argue that innocent people will die. Yes, but when in a defeated army every tenth man is flogged to death, the brave have to draw lots with the others. Exemplary punishment always contains an element of injustice. But individual wrongs are outweighed by the advantage to the community.
His views prevailed. The unlucky 400 were led off to execution with the Praetorian Guard called out to line the route and hold off the protesting crowd. Records of the persecutions of Christians (covered in Chapter 31) suggest that torture and ill-treatment of suspects was routine. When Lucius, the hero of Apuleius’ novel The Golden Ass (second century ad), is suspected of murder, instruments of torture, including hot coals and a rack, are produced in order to force him to reveal the names of his accomplices.
The Administration of the Provinces
In his Res Gestae Augustus boasted of ‘the achievements by which he subjected the whole world to the imperium of the Roman people’ On the whole the emperors brought a more stable pattern of provincial administration after the corruption of many provincial administrators during the Republic (see earlier pp. 418-19). As Tacitus wrote in the Annals:
The new order [of Augustus] was popular in the provinces. There government by Senate and People [had been] looked upon sceptically as a matter of sparring dignitaries and extortionate officials. The legal system had provided no remedy against these, since it was wholly incapacitated by violence, favouritism, and, most of all, bribery.
The more conscientious emperors, such as Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius, and Vespasian in the first century, took special care that administration was fair and oppressive governors punished. On a day-to-day basis the good emperor was a manager, hearing petitions and acceding to them or turning them down, watching that rivalries between cities did not get out of hand, stopping building projects that were swallowing money, such as, at the behest of Trajan, a theatre at Nicaea that was steadily sinking into the ground. In practice during the stable years of the empire, dramatic initiatives were less important than ensuring the existing structure ran smoothly. (See, as an introduction, part III, ‘Administration’, in David Potter (ed.), A Companion to the Roman Empire, Oxford and New York, 2006.)
Intrinsic to stable imperial government was the development of the emperors’ legal powers. These had been inherited from the magistrates of republican Rome. So, for instance, the emperor had the right to issue edicts proclaiming laws of a general character such as the granting of citizenship to the whole Roman world by Caracalla in 212 or Decius’ requirement for all to sacrifice in 249. Decrees (decreta) were rulings by the emperors on specific legal issues and, although not binding on all cases, came to have the force of law. Later in the empire edicts and rulings were synthesized in law codes, notably those of Theodosius II (438) and Justinian (534).
Since the reign of Augustus a distinction had been made between those more vulnerable border provinces (twenty-two of them in 138) where the governor, usually
Map 14
A senator, was appointed directly by the emperor as his legate, typically for a period of three years, and the remaining ‘senatorial’ provinces (ten of them in 138) where appointment was by lot from among senators of sufficient seniority. (They were granted proconsular powers.) Equestrians could serve as imperial legates, and in Egypt an equestrian (referred to as a prefect, a term officially used for one granted a military command) was always appointed, a reminder that this had been a personal conquest of Augustus. An equestrian received pay, at a generous rate for the senior posts, while a senator was supposed to do his job for the honour of it although he was given a substantial expense allowance. The title ‘Procurator’ was used by equestrian governors of minor provinces such as Judaea and of those who collected the taxes in the ‘imperial’ provinces (often referred to as ‘fiscal procurators’) or oversaw the emperor’s estates, the patrimonium (see earlier, p. 475). As the imperial estates were extensive, a procurator could call on a governor for troops if there was any disorder.
A governor was provided with a remarkably small staff. The proconsul of Asia, for instance, had no more than two or three junior senators to help with day-to-day administration of justice. There would also be attendants, messengers, scribes, and a bodyguard who could also be used to track down offenders. In addition a governor would also select a group of friends, chosen perhaps as much to provide company as for any administrative skills they might have. This would be his entire retinue. Separate would be the quaestors responsible for financial matters with taxation sent up to central government. They were elected in Rome and then allocated to provinces by lot. This was the first step on the ladder of an administrative career. It is said that the relationship of governor to quaestor was like one of father to son but a ‘good’ emperor would watch such men and promote them if they were able (see the career of Pertinax, pp. 514, 559 below). The total number of senior officials was no more than 150 for the whole empire, perhaps one for every 400,000 of its subjects. (Estimates for the population of the empire at its height reach 60-5 million.)
The official business of the empire travelled along its roads and across its seas. The original purpose of the roads was military, to provide a fast means for the legions to reach areas where trouble brewed, but once established they provided a means of uniting the peoples of the empire. They were built in a standard method by which a paved surface rested on three layers of foundation, which included broken stone and rammed chalk. Good drainage was essential if a surface and foundation was not to break up and was provided through a cambered surface and good ditching. (The roads really did last. I was once on an archaeological survey in my native Suffolk where the line of a Roman road was plotted across a hillside. A trial dig at the top of the hill revealed the road was still there, surface and all, nearly 2,000 years after it was built.) Travel could be fast. A special messenger sent from Mainz, on the German border, to Rome in ad 69 made the 1,500-kilometre journey in about nine days. The emperor Claudius averaged nearly 90 kilometres a day as he crossed Gaul on his way to his ‘conquest’ of Britain in ad 43. As seen earlier (pp. 1-3) sea travel was not so predictable for those wanting to move fast as winds and weather fluctuated so widely.
There was always a critical time in a new province when order was imposed. Any combination of mismanagement and greed at this moment could be disastrous. The revolt of the Iceni in Britain in ad 60 is a good example. Their home, the east of England, was nominally under Roman control and their king, Prasutagus, had left his estates in his will to the Roman emperor (Nero), probably so that on his death his subjects and heirs would be treated fairly. Local Roman officials took a different view and interpreted the bequest as if it was the surrender of a defeated enemy. Plundering began and Prasutagus’ widow, Boudicca, was flogged and his daughters raped. This was the signal for revolt. Other tribes that ‘had not yet been broken by servitude’ (Tacitus) joined in. The fury of the insurgents was directed first at Camulo-donum, centre of the imperial cult (the modern Colchester), and then at Londinium (London), now probably the main administrative centre of the province, and Veru-lamium (the modern St Albans). Tacitus gives a total of 70,000 Romans and loyalists killed. ‘The Britons took no prisoners, sold no captives as slaves, and went in for none of the usual trading of war. They wasted no time in getting down to the bloody business of hanging, burning and crucifying.’ It was some time before the Roman governor, Suetonius Paulinus, could bring up his legions and use their discipline to crush the disorderly mass of British warriors. He then set about laying waste to their lands. On some sites, such as Colchester and South Cadbury in Somerset, archaeologists have been able to identify the layer of destruction. The ‘desolation’ the Romans made did in fact lead to peace. Archaeological evidence shows that when construction resumed on these sites, it was more likely to be of civilian than military buildings. (David Mattingley’s An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, London, 2006, provides a fresh perspective on Britain in the empire. See also Charlotte Higgins, Under Another Sky, Journeys in Roman Britain, London, 2013.)
There had been no centralized taxation in Celtic Britain. In contrast, when the territories of the Carthaginian empire had been taken over their procedures for collecting tax had been retained and this was often the precedent followed when systems were already in place and had proved effective. In Egypt where a complex but long-established system of taxation had channelled resources from the Nile valley to pharaohs and now to Roman emperors, it was easy to exploit. Surviving papyri document the efficiency with which money was collected. In Ephesus, capital of the Roman province of Asia, an inscription from the time of Nero shows that the structure of taxation set up by the kings of Pergamum two centuries before was still in place. There was some scope for flexibility. When an earthquake struck the cities of Asia Minor the emperor Tiberius relieved them of taxation for five years. Again, the Frisians on the German border were cattle herders—it actually made more sense for them to pay their dues in hides rather than in coins as the leather could be transferred at once to the army.
Once order had been secured in a province a census was put in hand. The purpose of the census was to provide the basis on which taxes could be assessed. When Judaea became a Roman province in ad 6, for instance, the governor of the neighbouring province of Syria, Quirinius, moved in to make the assessment. (It must have been this census that Luke mistakenly links in his Gospel to the birth of Jesus.
Galilee was not a province of the empire at the time of Jesus’ birth, it was subject to the taxation of Herod and later his son Herod Antipas, not the Roman authorities.) It would have been impossible to take the census without local help and so the local ruling classes were given much of the responsibility for compiling the details. If no other system existed, the two taxes were a poll tax, on individuals, including their workforce (from which Roman citizens were exempt), and a tax on property.
In the third century the jurist Ulpian recorded the procedure for the property tax. Each farm had to be named and described in relation to its neighbours and local town or village. The use of the land had to be entered, the amount of plough land, the number of vines and olive trees, and the extent of meadow and pasture. Houses and slaves were included. The amount of tax due was then computed and increasingly it was the city officials who were then responsible for its collection. Censuses were carried out every ten years in most provinces, every fourteen in Egypt, where some 300 declarations of property owned have survived. The publicani, the notorious tax farmers of the republic, disappear from the historical record, though their successors cannot have been much more welcome. Italy and Italian colonies remained exempt from these two taxes, a legacy of the days when republican plunder had balanced public expenditure. The exemption was finally ended by the emperor Diocletian.
There were other taxes. Augustus had instituted an inheritance tax, payable only by Roman citizens, specifically to fund discharge settlements for the army. There were indirect taxes on goods in transit, charged at a rate that was usually between 2 and 2.5 per cent and often collected by teams of imperial slaves, and a 1.5 per cent sales tax. They were very unpopular and Nero was tempted in a fit of generosity to abolish them altogether until he was persuaded that the state could not have borne the loss of revenue.
The taxation system had the advantage of being easy to administer and cheap to run. The revenue, normally in denarii, but also in kind, was transferred upwards to the imperial treasury and could then be distributed according to the needs of the empire. This enabled resources to be allocated from the richer provinces such as Asia and Africa to the poorer such as Britain, which required a permanent and expensive garrison. The overall burden was probably not oppressive. In the east the amount of grain raised seems to have been similar to that raised by the Seleucids. The weakness of the system was its inflexibility and perhaps the relatively low level at which taxation was set. As over 70 per cent of the empire’s revenue was devoted to keeping the army intact, a sudden crisis, an attack on the borders, for instance, that required heavy extra expenditure on troops, strained the system. There was naturally resentment if any extra exactions were suddenly imposed. (Increased provincial taxation had been behind the revolt against Nero.) Until Diocletian reorganized the financial system in the early fourth century and instituted a more efficient system of taxing the empire’s wealth emperors in difficulties were tempted to debase the coinage or encourage the legions to claw their food and supplies directly from the local population.
The scope of the governor’s powers and any specific responsibilities attached to his post were normally set out before he left Rome. Within his province the governor could make his own statement of his priorities. Central was his responsibility for maintaining order. Ulpian sums it up well:
A good and conscientious governor must see that the province he rules is peaceful and quiet, and he will achieve this without difficulty if he is scrupulous by ensuring that the province is actively searching out criminals. He should pick out those guilty of sacrilege, highwaymen, kidnappers and thieves and punish them according to their offences; he should also punish anyone who shelters them, as robbers cannot be hidden without such help.
In some cases the maintenance of order necessitated military campaigns but by the second century small-scale criminal cases predominated. Certain towns were designated as assize towns. The status was eagerly sought after as the influx of claimants, petitioners, and other hangers-on would be substantial and bring in a great deal of business. The town would be given a designated territory from which its cases would be drawn. In some areas the process was pragmatic. In eastern Syria the Romans found a network of small villages. They chose one, Appadana, and promoted it to an assize city that they then gave a Greek name, Neapolis, appropriately ‘the new city’. They cemented the loyalty of its inhabitants by granting them a council whose members were awarded Roman citizenship. Neapolis’s local magistrates, as with other cities, would be required to have the local criminals rounded up by the time the governor arrived. Justice was clearly rough. Although a governor could order a full investigation if he had doubts about any case, he often bowed to popular pressures and many criminals seem to have been condemned without much of a hearing. (Again the case of Jesus comes to mind as typical. He seems to have been flogged almost as a matter of course, and Pontius Pilate, the governor, put up little opposition to his crucifixion.)
Private citizens could also bring their civil cases, petitioning the governor to have them heard according to Roman law when there seemed an advantage for them in doing so. There is an Egyptian record of one prefect receiving no fewer than 1,804 petitions in three days. Gradually the use of Roman law became more popular, particularly when individuals from different cities or opposing legal systems were involved. It had well-set-out procedures and the use of precedent gave it some stability. Some city constitutions stipulated that any situation not covered by existing laws should be judged according to Roman civil law. In one long-running (from AD 213 to 237) case a dispute, between two villages in Phrygia over the extent of their obligations to provide transport for imperial officials, saw three procurators (the villages were within the boundaries of an imperial estate) struggling to unravel the issues. The representatives of the villages showed that they fully understood the imperial structure of justice, the laws established by precedent and their rights of appeal to higher officials, including, in the case of citizens, directly to the emperor. In this case the smaller village accused the larger village of bullying it and, when it won its case, it asked for a soldier to be appointed to protect it against its neighbour.
In addition to using Roman law as established by statute in Rome or by precedent the governor could create local laws himself. This was inevitable when he might be faced with unique circumstances in an outlying province two months’ travel from Rome. Communication did go on, however. In the famous correspondence between Pliny, governor of Bithynia, and the emperor Trajan, Pliny asks advice on a wide variety of issues: how to deal with Christians, how to punish slaves who tried to enlist in the army, whether he should put in hand the building of a canal between a lake and the sea, and at what age the emperor recommended entry to a local senate. Trajan’s courteous replies insist that the administration should be in the interests of the people and that local tradition should be respected.
Altogether there were forty issues on which Pliny wrote for advice in two years. Many of them seem trivial but it can be assumed that on many more everyday matters he made up his mind himself. Gullible governors were often unwittingly involved in local power struggles and one suspects that Pliny was often caught by rival petitions from ambitious provincials that were difficult to resolve. Once a formal edict of the emperor or records of decisions made by the senate had been issued it could be recorded in inscriptions and again this represented a way in which the governor could escape direct criticism. These inscriptions not only acted as a permanent reminder of Rome’s power but could be phrased to provide propaganda for the emperor concerned. The Res Gestae, probably set up in Ancyra at the behest of the provincial governor, is the classic example (see earlier, p. 463).
While the Romans had total confidence in their right to rule, it is hard to find any evidence of an imperial ideology. There was no vision towards which the governors or emperors guided their subject peoples. They relied instead on the natural integration of those who had an interest in the maintenance of a stable system with the Roman authorities. Over the centuries of the pax Romana it worked until outside pressures on the empire showed that such a vast area could not easily be defended against determined outsiders. Even then there proved to be a resilience on the structure of government that allowed it to be refocused for further survival. (See Chapters 30 and 32.)
World History
