Just as we know of the powerful generals who seized power in Rome so we have all heard of the emperors who succeeded them. These rulers were omnipotent. Most of them were ruthless and some of them were quite simply mad as well. The first five Roman emperors, who between them ruled for nearly a century, from 31 BC to AD 68, were Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, and together formed what came to be known as the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
Roman coin bearing the likeness of Augustus.
Augustus
Julius Caesar’s adopted son Octavian, known later as Augustus, had emerged as the undisputed first ruler of the Roman Empire in 31 BC after the period of civil strife that marked the end of the Republican era. He enjoyed a long reign, during which time he created a relatively stable society and gained the trust of the Senate and the people. He scaled down the military, created bodies to lake charge of policing the streets and fire-waiching, and reformed the system of currency. He taxed the people prudently and spent the money on improving the conditions of the ordinary citizen. He did not seek to enrich himself but concentrated on civic improvements, such as the completion of the Theatre of Marcellus in 11 BC (named in honour of his nephew), and a new Forum that was finished in 2 BC. His claim for Rome that he ‘found it brick and left it marble’ is more than justified.
Rome, by then with a population of around a million, was growing as a trading centre and was about to overtake Alexandria as the hub of the civilized world. His was a golden age, the age of Horace, Virgil and Livy, and Augustus made sure that art and literature flourished under his patronage. (He made an example of the poet Ovid, however, and sent him into exile in AD 8 because he felt he was not reverential enough.) Not that his interests were exclusively cerebral. He is said to have sent ten thousand gladiators into the arena and Suetonius declared that he ‘surpassed all his predecessors in the frequency, variety and magnificence of his public shows’. But he recognized that the games were open to political abuse and in 22 BC he passed a law limiting the praetors (magistrates ranking on the next level below a consul) to two shows while in office, with a maximum of 120 gladiators.
The games were now a regular feature of Roman life and the most imponant one was always held to coincide with the festival of Saturnalia, which was held at the winter solstice in honour of Saturn, the god identified with crops and agriculture. Augustus was responsible for establishing the tradition of holding the animal hunts {venationes) in the mornings, the executions at midday and the gladiatorial contests (munera) in the afternoons. He also decreed that a losing gladiator should not automatically be killed but would have his fate decided by the public, with the emperor having the final say.
Roman coin bearing the likeness of Tiberius.
Tiberius
Tiberius was Augustus’s adopted son and nominated successor but had not been his first choice. Maybe at the age of 54 Tiberius was too old to settle happily into the role of emperor and all the other offices that came with the job, for he was not a natural statesman and had spent most of his working life in the army, serving in the Rhineland and the Balkans. His reign is generally considered to have been undistinguished, marked by a lack of interest in public life. He commissioned very few new buildings and did not relish the gladiatorial games.
The Roman historian Tacitus (AD c. 56-c. 120) records a disaster that happened in a wooden amphitheatre during his reign (AD 14-37), when 50,000 people were killed or injured:
Atilius, the son of a freedman, undertook to build an amphitheatre at Fidenae for the exhibition of gladiators. The foundation was inadequate and the superstructure insufficiently braced... the place being at no great distance from Rome, a vast conflux of men and women, old and young, crowded together. The consequence was that the building, overloaded with spectators, gave way at once. All who were inside, besides a prodigious multitude that stood round the place were crushed under the ruins. The condition of those who perished instantly was the happiest. They escaped the pangs of death, while the maimed and lacerated lingered in torment, beholding as long as daylight lasted, their wives and children in equal agony, and, during the night, pierced to the heart by their shrieks and groans.
In spite of this catastrophe Tiberius made no attempt to ban wooden amphitheatres. Instead Atilius was blamed for not spending enough money on building the amphitheatre properly and he was banished. Such buildings continued to go up and they occasionally collapsed. Over a thousand people were killed in an amphitheatre disaster in the middle of the second century AD and there was another one a century and a half later.
Caligula
The whole of Caligula’s short life was one of political intrigue. He was barely in his twenties when his mother and two of his brothers were
Opposite
The Roman empire In AD 80 stretched from Spain to Syria and from England to Egypt.
Executed amid accusations of conspiracy to kill Tiberius, who was his great-uncle. His brief reign began in AD 37 and ended violently with his assassination during a gladiatorial show outside the imperial palace on the Palatine Hill in AD 41. He was 29 years old. He emerges from the various descriptions of him as a neurotic insomniac, an ugly man greedy for gold, jewels and other riches, and capable of extreme cruelty bom of envy and insecurity.
Roman bust of Caligula, who found the perfect outlet for his sadism in the arena.
Suetonius tells us that Caligula was the first emperor to become really enthusiastic about chariot-racing, gladiators and the games. He supported the Thracians - he sometimes appeared in the arena dressed as one himself and he placed two of them in command of his bodyguards - and he hated their traditional opponents, the miirmillones. Men from both
Groups engaged in mock fights with him, using wooden swords. There was one occasion when Caligula was practising with a murmillo who feigned a fall rather too realistically. The emperor stabbed him with a dagger and then ran about the arena waving a palm branch, just as the real victors did.
When it came to the games, he took every opportunity to show his subjects just how sadistic he could be. He loved to humiliate people in public and the Colosseum seemed like an excellent place to do this. It gave him pleasure to pitch a feeble old man against a fit young criminal in the arena and he would often force disabled people to dress up as paegniarii - the clowns and comic actors of the gladiatorial world. On hot days he would have the awning taken down, refuse to let anyone leave, and then watch people suffering in the baking sun.
Caligula was jealous of the good looks of Aesius Proculus, nicknamed the Giant Cupid, and the son of a top centurion. Caligula ordered him to be dragged into the arena and matched first against a retiariiis and then a secutor. When Proculus won both fights Caligula had him dragged through the streets in rags and executed. His greed knew no bounds. He insisted that his subjects should will their property to him and sold off anything that came into his possession. Once when he was selling gladiators he noticed that senator Aponius Saturninus had nodded off. He told the auctioneer to accept the sleeping senator’s nods as bids, with the result that Saturninus awoke to find he had bought 13 gladiators and owed the emperor 9 million sesterces.
Roman bust of Claudius.
Tiberius had found the games rather boring and had tried to restrict them but Caligula was much more hands-on. He created the special post of curator munerum, a sort of events organizer, but killed the first man to take the job. What this man’s offence was is not recorded but Suetonius says that Caligula had him ‘beaten with chains in his presence for several successive days, and only killed him when he became disgusted at the stench of his putrefied brain’.
Claudius
The popular image of Caligula’s uncle Claudius comes from Robert Graves’s two novels, /, Claudius and Claudius the God, written in the 1930s and dramatized for British television in the 1970s.
Presented as though they were genuine autobiographies, these fictional accounts create the image of an intelligent, sensitive man, handicapped by spasmodic movements and a stammer, who turns into a tyrant and is betrayed by those closest to him. His growing paranoia was perhaps justified as he was the victim of several assassination attempts, and his death in AD 54 was certainly suspicious. There were rumours that his wife Agrippina had poisoned him. She was to die a violent death herself five years later, at the hands of her own son, Nero, who had ordered her assassination. She reportedly confronted the centurion who had been sent to kill her with the words, ‘Here, strike the womb that bore a monster.*
Nero
In AD 57 Nero had a richly decorated wooden amphitheatre built on the Campus Martius, a site he chose because the arena could be flooded with water from the nearby River Tiber to put on naval battles and sea monster shows. Somewhat uncharacteristically, Nero went for a bloodless inauguration for his amphitheatre and did not even bother with the usual midday executions, though he took the opponunity to humiliate four hundred senators and six hundred equestrians by compelling them to take part in a mock gladiator contest and an animal hunt.
The Golden Palace
In AD 64 Nero’s amphitheatre and the Theatre of Taurus were both destroyed in a fire that swept through the area to the east of the Palatine Hill, where the imperial palace was situated. Thousands of people were made homeless and the angry mob pointed the finger at their emperor, claiming that he had done nothing to help them. This is the origin of the story that Nero fiddled while Rome burned (he was an accomplished lyre-player). Whatever he was doing at the time, Nero swiftly passed the buck by blaming the Christians and making an example of some of them by having them executed. And then, like all good despots, he continued to ignore the plight of his people and decided instead to put the razed land to good use by refurbishing his old palace.
Nero’s new residence, the Golden Palace (Domus Aurea), and its landscaped estate covered an area of about 125 acres. The original site on the Palatine Hill was extended across the valleys and hills to the east and north as far as the old walls of the city and included lavish accommodation beside an artificial ornamental lake, surrounded by vineyards, woodland and animal pastures.
By this time Nero had surrounded himself with servile admirers who encouraged his grandiose schemes and shielded him from the city’s problems. He preferred to spend his time studying poetry, drama and music.
Roman coin bearing the likeness of Nero, whose Golden Palace stood on the site subsequently occupied by the Colosseum.
Paranoia gradually took hold of him and he began to think that everyone was plotting against him. He suspected conspiracy at every turn, especially among the aristocracy, whom he had always mistrusted, and he ordered the execution without trial of several senators. This act turned his fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy and he was soon aware of a genuine plot to get rid of him. More executions followed.
The Senate declared Nero a public enemy and offered the throne to Galba, the governor of Spain. Nero now had nowhere to go. The Praetorian Guard turned against him and he tried to flee the city but found all escape routes blocked. He took the only honourable way left open to him: he plunged a dagger into his heart and killed himself.
Vespasian
Emperor Vespasian, unlike Nero, was not a nobleman but a member of the equestrian class (the class below the senatorial class) and he had worked his way up through the system. As was common at the lime, his military and political careers progressed in parallel. He was elected a military tribune at the age of 18 and then became a quaestor (the lowest rank of magistrate). By the age of 31 he had achieved the rank of aedile (a junior magistrate in charge of public works) and was then made a praetor (the second to highest level of magistrate).
Vespasian served in Thrace (modern Bulgaria) and Crete and in AD 42 Claudius made him the commander of a legion and sent him to Strasbourg, moving him to Britain a year later, where he look part in the capture of Camulodunum (Colchester). He received honours during Claudius's triumph in AD 44 and returned to Rome three years later. He became a consul in AD 51 but for ten years the political intrigue involving Claudius's fourth wife, Agrippina, and her son Nero deprived Vespasian of the governorship to which he felt he was entitled. Whenever his detractors wanted to insult him they would call him ‘the mule-trader’ - a reference to the way he made a living during these lean years without imperial patronage.
Claudius's death cleared the way for Vespasian to return to public life and he was rewarded with the governorship he had waited so long for and sent to North Africa. He was regarded as a just and honourable governor if
Not a particularly popular one, though at least he did not use the position to increase his own personal wealth. He was with Nero on a tour of Greece when news came through of a revolt in Jerusalem. Nero gave him the job of putting down the revolt. He set out for Judaea, travelling overland through Turkey, while his son Titus, who was 27, was despatched by sea to Alexandria. In March AD 67 Vespasian reached Antioch in Syria, where he Joined forces with Titus to advance into Galilee and Samaria. One by one the cities, towns and mountain strongholds succumbed to the Roman onslaught - Gabara, Jotapata, Tiberias, Tarichae, Gamala - and Vespasian marched southwards towards Jericho, knocking out all the key towns on the route to Jerusalem.
Opposite Roman bust of Vespasian, who commissioned the building of the Colosseum in AD 69. He would not live to see its completion.
Vespasian was in Caesarea when he heard of Nero’s death and the succession of the new emperor, Galba. It was soon obvious that this appointment was not at all popular and there were some legions, most notably those serving in northern Germany, who had refused to swear allegiance to him. They had wanted their own commander, Verginius, to be emperor. Galba swiftly recalled Verginius to Rome to forestall any revolt but failed to win the Senate round. As a result Rome went through a brief period of civil unrest and between AD 68 and 69 suffered three emperors altogether - Galba (assassinated), Otho (committed suicide) and Vitellius (assassinated).
Vespasian emerged victorious from this bloodbath and his ten-year reign from AD 69 marked the start of a new dynasty and a reformed system of imperial rule. It was a period of peace and stability and Vespasian placed the emphasis on building public rather than private memorials. He was determined to win the people’s respect and one of his more popular gestures was to throw the gardens of Nero’s Golden Palace open to the public. He also started to develop the idea of building a permanent amphitheatre there.
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