Modern professional historians tend to stress how little we know about the Roman world. True, we are almost completely in the dark about what life was like for the slum dwellers of the city (though we can make a fair guess!) or for peasants struggling to find a livelihood in the countryside. And we are not much better off when it comes to understanding the feelings of women or slaves, or how the Roman empire’s balance of payments actually worked, or – for that matter – what Romans wore under their togas or how they disposed of their sewage (the miracles of Roman drainage have, I am afraid, been grossly exaggerated). But on a wide range of other aspects we are probably better informed about Rome than about any other society before the fifteenth century. We have direct access to the writings, the thoughts and feelings of Roman politicians, poets, philosophers, critics and commentators.
Take Julius Caesar, for example, and his decision to march on Rome – a decision that launched the civil war that effectively ended democracy and ushered in the one-man rule of the emperors (see Chapter II). We still have his own autobiographical account of these events, published in his multivolume memoirs, On the Civil War. In some ways it makes strange reading; for example, he refers to himself throughout in the third person: ‘Caesar decided. . .’, not ‘I decided’. In other ways it is a stirring story, and a clever justification of his actions.
But not only that. From the run-up to the outbreak of war and through the conflict itself we can still read a series of private letters written by – and sometimes to – one of Rome’s most weighty statesmen (or so he would have liked to think). This was Marcus Tullius Cicero, who was also a notable philosopher and orator, as well as a supporter of Pompey, Caesar’s rival. It is still something of a mystery how these letters were preserved and published. But they certainly give us an extraordinary insider’s view of a man wrestling with his doubts and indecisions about whom to support and how to make the best of it when he found himself on the losing side – all interspersed with the day-to-day problems of disloyal slaves, divorce, the death of a daughter, and shady property deals.
As it turned out, Caesar was characteristically generous to Cicero; whatever his political ruthlessness, ‘clemency’ was one of his slogans. But after Caesar’s assassination, his apparatchik Mark Antony (of ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen. . .’ fame) had him summarily ‘removed’. The story was that after Cicero’s death, his hands and tongue (his most powerful political weapons in writing and speaking) were pinned up on display in the Roman Forum, and that Antony’s wife took particular pleasure in piercing them with her hairpins. It’s a story that speaks as much about Roman views of women as about the hatred of Antony and his wife for Cicero.
Of course, none of these accounts is as simple as it seems. Neither Caesar’s own memoirs, nor Cicero’s published correspondence, are any more reliable than the equivalents penned by a modern politician. We cannot take them straightforwardly on trust. But they do bring us directly to the heart of Roman history and politics. And they are not alone. We get our most detailed and vivid information about the unsuccessful Jewish Revolt against the Romans (see Chapter IV), which ended with the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in AD 70, from the history written by one of the participants – Josephus – a Jewish rebel and then notorious turncoat, who ended up living comfortably in Rome under the patronage of the emperor Vespasian. Most stories of unsuccessful rebellions are told by the winners. There is, in fact, no other such detailed account by a rebel against an imperial power from any empire before the modern period.
And even if nothing significant survives from the mouth or pen of the emperor Nero himself, there are still extraordinary pieces of writing by members of his court circle and by key players in the politics of that notorious reign. We have, for example, a philosophical treatise addressed to Nero by his tutor Seneca, giving some clear and level-headed advice on how to be an emperor. Clemency usually works better than cruelty was the general message – following the example of Julius Caesar. As we shall see, Seneca did not in the end win clemency from his old pupil; in fact, he was to die a slow and agonizing death at Nero’s behest.
Some people think that a hilarious skit on Nero’s predecessor, the emperor Claudius, becoming a god was also written by Seneca while he still enjoyed Nero’s favour. Claudius was apparently an unpromising candidate for immortality by Roman standards (he limped, stuttered and was believed to be a fool). And the satire – which now goes under the English title The Pumpkinification of Claudius (a pun on ‘deification’) – pokes cruel but hilarious fun at him in particular and, more generally, at the whole Roman institution of making ‘good’ emperors (and some not so ‘good’ ones) into gods. One of the characters in the skit is the first emperor Augustus, the gold standard against whom all future emperors were measured. He was made a god on his death in AD 14, but decades later, Seneca jokes, he still hasn’t nerved himself to make his maiden speech in the heavenly senate, so in awe is he of all the ‘proper’ deities. It is one of the very few pieces of ancient comedy that can still make you laugh out loud. Humour doesn’t usually travel well across cultures, but The Pumpkinification works for me at least.
In addition to this rich and varied evidence from some of the leading characters themselves, there are also detailed accounts by later Roman historians of the incidents discussed in this book. In the forefront is the cynical analysis of the early years of the Roman empire, written in his Annals and Histories by Tacitus, himself a Roman senator of the late first century and early second century ad. This account is as much a meditation on corruption and the abuse of power as an historical narrative. It contains, for example, the chilling tale of Nero’s murder of his mother, Agrippina, with which Chapter III opens. After an unsuccessful attempt at doing away with her by sending her out to sea in a collapsible boat, Nero resorts to sending in some armed thugs. As matricide, this was one step worse than the fratricide that marked the very beginning of Rome.
But Tacitus is only one point of access to the ancient historical tradition. From roughly the same period as Tacitus we have a series of racy ‘Lives of the Emperors’ by Suetonius, who worked for a time in the palace bureaucracy and seems to have had some access to the imperial filing cabinets, or their ancient equivalents. Then there are the moralizing biographies by Plutarch, a Greek inhabitant of the Roman empire, who produced a series of life stories of famous Romans going back to Romulus. Most of these were paired with an appropriate figure from the Greek world. Julius Caesar, for example, pointedly turns up as the biographical twin of Alexander the Great, the most successful conqueror the world had ever known, with a similarly tragic end, and – admittedly unproven – suspicions of assassination.
All in all, we have a lot for which to thank those medieval monks who painstakingly copied these ancient texts in an unbroken tradition since antiquity, and thus kept them alive to be rediscovered in the Renaissance – later to be interpreted and reinterpreted by us.