Emperor of Rome, page 22
A perfect example of both these tendencies is found in one long inscription discovered in what is now Bulgaria, giving details of a petition by a group of local villagers to the emperor Gordian III in 238 CE, followed by the reply (the whole copied down, it says, from the imperial response posted in Rome ‘in the portico of the Baths of Trajan’, presumably a convenient public noticeboard). The petitioners had a heart-wrenching story of how their village – a tiny place by the name of Skaptopara, the home of some nice thermal baths and close to a popular market – had been repeatedly trashed by Roman soldiers and officials passing through, demanding free food, drink, billeting and entertainment. It was so dreadful that they were thinking, they said, of ‘leaving our ancestral homes because of the violence done to us … and so we beg you, unconquerable emperor … to order that everyone sticks to his own route and does not leave the other villages and come to us and compel us to offer provisions at our own expense, and to order that we should not have to provide accommodation to those who are not entitled’. After more than 160 lines of text in Greek laying out the villagers’ case, Gordian’s answer in just four lines written in Latin was that they should go back and ask the governor of their province to sort it out. No easy solution was forthcoming from the palace. The best the petitioners will have achieved is that, armed with this imperial response, their problem was fast-tracked with the local administration. Possibly that had always been their aim in any case.
50. A glimpse of the ‘paperwork’ of the Roman empire. This is the start of the list of cases heard by Septimius Severus and Caracalla in Egypt (though Caracalla, not yet a teenager, could hardly have played a major role). Below the heading, the document states that it is a copy of the responses posted up in the gymnasium. The three lines of cramped writing near the top add in the formal names and titles of the emperors, obviously mistakenly omitted from the first version. See further, p. 232.
Who wrote what?
Whether the replies were perfunctory or not (and not all were), the emperor had a lot of help in dealing with the deluge of requests. There was legal advice available from an unofficial roster of experts, such as Pliny or those parodies of courtiers who turned up to adjudicate on Domitian’s turbot (there is no need to imagine Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus struggling with ‘the case of the false confession’ on their own). And there were also those key divisions of the palace staff – the Latin secretariat, the Greek secretariat and the petitions department. Another of Statius’s poems praises the head of the Latin secretariat under Domitian, a ‘father-of-Claudius-Etruscus’ type, who is pictured at the control centre of a web of communications ‘with the most demanding job in the palace’. The poet jokes that he processes even more messages than the god Mercury himself – the divine messenger whose winged sandals ensured speedy delivery. But the remit of these departments must have extended beyond the practical aspects of ‘processing’ to such jobs as taking dictation (the word ‘checked’ written at the end of some responses probably suggests that), working up finished drafts after a simple imperial ‘Tell him no’, and more. We have already seen a few replies from ‘Trajan’ to his man in Pontus-Bithynia that would have needed no input at all from the emperor himself, and were very likely composed entirely by the secretariat. The added extra in the story of the Skaptoparans is that Gordian was just thirteen years old when they sent their petition. He may well never have even read of their plight, let alone had anything to do with composing ‘his’ reply.
It is absolutely certain that no emperor answered every begging letter himself. One head of the Greek secretariat under Septimius Severus, for example, was credited by a learned admirer with being the best letter-writer in the world, excelling not only in clarity, and stylistic tricks, but also, like an actor or good ghostwriter, in capturing the imperial persona in the letters he wrote on the ruler’s behalf. Greek letters might have been a special case. Even a functionally bilingual emperor might have needed help with the rhetorical niceties of Greek. But it is impossible to imagine that the other leading legal or literary figures who sometimes headed these divisions, Suetonius among them for a while, would have spent their days as merely clerks and copyists. What can never be certain is exactly who wrote what, or how many of the imperial pronouncements were ghosted by the staff.
Practices must have changed all the time, depending among other things on whether the emperor concerned was diligent or lazy, a control freak or a delegator, at home or on military campaign, an inexperienced teenager or a long-serving elder statesman. There is, in any case, always a fuzzy boundary between ghostwriting, editing, drafting or polishing. But just as important as who really did write the letters was who was thought to write them. And, for most people, that was the emperor.
The emperor’s new pen
In the Roman imagination the ruler was always a pen-pusher as much as a libertine. Just like Fronto in his advice to Marcus Aurelius about ‘sending letters all over the world’, when Romans pictured the emperor, they did not only see him at dinner, or commanding his troops, or misbehaving on a grand scale, they also saw him dealing with his papers, his casework and his correspondence. That side is captured in memorable vignettes of Julius Caesar, whether working on his letters and petitions at the races (a trick later tried by Marcus Aurelius) or ostentatiously multitasking on his military campaigns, by dictating to two secretaries simultaneously as he rode on horseback. It is also captured in the story of Hadrian who – when asked to adjudicate whether a baby born eleven months after the death of its ‘father’ could be considered legitimate – went off to do his own research in the medical textbooks. He came up with the answer ‘yes’, which was bizarrely wrong even by ancient scientific standards.
Reading was part of the imperial image too. How the emperor read, and responded to, the letters he received was a good diagnostic of his character. Caligula – not an obvious candidate for devotion to paperwork – supposedly became visibly cross while scanning a letter from the governor of Judaea that gave him some advice that he did not want to hear (namely, to think twice before placing a statue of himself in the Temple in Jerusalem). Augustus reportedly sacked another governor for making a crass spelling error in a dispatch that the emperor must have seen with his own eyes (how else would he have spotted the mistake?). It was a sign of his pedantry, but also of a touch of hypocrisy, since he was said to be an erratic speller himself. More honourably, Marcus Aurelius was supposed to have wept as he read a letter that described the damage to the city of Smyrna (Izmir) caused by an earthquake: ‘when he came to the passage “the west winds blow through her like a desert” he shed tears on the page’ and promptly promised funds to restore the place.
It is perhaps no surprise that the humble stylus, or Roman metal pen, was one of the emperor’s trademark accessories. He was always imagined as having one to hand. It was with his stylus that Julius Caesar tried to defend himself against the daggers of his assassins. This was Domitian’s weapon of choice in his nasty pastime of skewering flies. And, according to Galen in a short compilation of cruel ‘pen injuries’, it was with his stylus that Hadrian, in a fit of temper, stabbed the eye of a slave. He was later shamed when, in remorse, he asked the slave what gift he would like in compensation – ‘my eye back’, was the simple reply. For better or worse, pens and emperors went together.
And the assumption, of course, was that – unless they were dictating – emperors actually wrote with those pens too. Even if a few in the inner circle knew better, generally the words that appeared in the name of the emperor were taken to be the words of, and written by, the emperor. It wasn’t his secretaries who were criticised for the identikit replies, it was Commodus himself.
That is one reason why the responses of the emperor were so commonly inscribed on stone or bronze in cities across the empire and put on display. Even if only a minority could actually read them (20 per cent is one common modern guess for rates of literacy among men in the empire), it was a way of putting the emperor himself on display. It is also one reason why any public hint of a gap between the emperor’s words (whether written or oral) and the emperor’s own authorship could be used as a weapon against him, almost as if it challenged his right to rule. Young Nero, for example, was denigrated as the first emperor to need – in Tacitus’s clever phrase – ‘borrowed eloquence’, when he delivered a funeral eulogy for his stepfather Claudius that had actually been composed by his tutor Seneca. And the emperor Julian enjoyed a snide joke about Trajan along the same lines: he was so lazy that he had his friend Lucius Licinius Sura write his speeches for him (a rather different view from the picture of a super-conscientious Trajan that we find in Pliny). It was another important fiction of imperial culture – and another version of where the buck stopped – that whenever you received a reply from an emperor you took it for granted that it was the man himself who was writing to you. The emperor was what ‘the emperor’ wrote or said.
From the bottom up
The inscriptions recording the decisions of the emperor in answer to the petitions of individuals or, more often, of local communities, present an image of a benevolent and conscientious ruler. The words of Domitian, for example, posted on a sheet of bronze in the small Italian town of Falerio, show him coming down in favour of the Falerians in their long-running land dispute with the neighbouring town of Firmum (the emperor, or someone on his staff, had dug out a previous adjudication by Augustus decades earlier, which seemed to settle the case). Another long text, on display in a small community in North Africa, records Commodus’s response in support of a group of tenant farmers who had appealed to him after being abused by a local Roman official and his partner in crime (not only had the rent been increased, but a posse of soldiers had been sent in to beat them up). In some places whole archives were inscribed for public display. At Aphrodisias, for example, a city in what is now Turkey, named after the goddess Aphrodite, one wall at the entrance to the theatre was covered with documents carved into the stone: letters from emperors, the senate and other leading Romans, including a positive reply from Hadrian to an embassy of Aphrodisians asking to be excused from some (otherwise unknown) tax on nails.
It is very easy to get the impression from all this that the empire was filled with satisfied customers, people whose disputes had been settled, cases resolved or petitions granted by (or in the name of) the emperor. There were certainly some of those and they made a lot of noise. But the evidence is overwhelmingly skewed in favour of the successful. Those whose pleas were rejected or roughly handled would not have chosen to parade their failures in writing. The people of Firmum did not choose to inscribe Domitian’s decision when it went in favour of the Falerians. The only reason that we know of the unsuccessful attempt of Livia to intervene on behalf of the people of Samos is because a copy of Augustus’s letter was displayed, no doubt gleefully, by their rivals, the Aphrodisians. And the simple fact that the Skaptoparans publicised so fully their petition and its response is one thing that suggests that ‘fast-tracking’ with the local authorities had been the limits of their ambitions all along.
51. Part of the so-called ‘Archive Wall’ at Aphrodisias. It amounted to a public display of the town’s relationship with the authorities in Rome, largely in the form of copies of letters from the emperor inscribed in stone.
Besides, most people with problems in the Roman empire would not have got as far as failure at this level anyway. For the majority of inhabitants of the Roman world, whatever their plight, the prospect of a direct approach to the emperor was always more myth than reality. It was hard enough, as Philo found, for the well-connected, well-resourced and very determined to present their case to an elusive ruler. And the anxieties that even the educated might have in trying to win the emperor over are reflected in surviving ancient textbooks, which give detailed advice on how to do it. What should you say, for example, if you want to get him to send relief to a city that has been struck by a natural disaster? Answer: praise his compassion, say that the gods sent him to earth to help those in distress, vividly describe the devastation of the town and conjure up the idea of the whole population in tears begging for his mercy. But this kind of sophistication was well out of reach of most ordinary individuals or communities, not to mention all the practical difficulties that would get in their way.
It might have been relatively easy to take advantage of the emperor passing through your local area, and many did so (hence the casualty figures at Antioch). But appealing to the emperor in Rome from a distant province was quite another matter. It was sometimes actively discouraged by the local authorities, who preferred to keep things ‘in house’ (that, at least, is the implication of a ruling by Alexander Severus, quoted in a legal handbook, that governors should not try to prevent people forwarding their cases to the emperor). It also took a great deal of time and money, maybe a few months’ journey there and back, and it needed confidence and knowledge of how things worked in the capital even to press a simple libellus into the emperor’s hand. Where would you do it? How would you get access? Where, even, was the front door to the palace? On one occasion, at a public ‘greeting’, Augustus was said to have bantered with a man who was hesitating to present him with a petition (one minute holding his hand out, the next drawing it back): ‘you look like you’re trying to give a penny to an elephant’. It is quoted by more than one ancient writer as a great example of the emperor’s sense of humour. It also captures the terror on the part of the petitioner unfamiliar with procedures.
I strongly suspect that many of the apparently ordinary cases presented to the emperor in Rome by apparently ordinary people were not quite so ordinary as they look. Sometimes there may have been more at stake than immediately meets the eye (that is my hunch with the case of the accidental homicide by chamber pot in the town of Knidos that was referred to Augustus). Sometimes it is clear that those bringing their requests were not entirely outsiders, but had their paths eased by useful connections in or near the circles of the emperor. There is a little giveaway of that in the petition of the Skaptoparans. How on earth did this remote village manage to make its voice heard in the capital? It was thanks to a villager resident in Rome itself. As the inscription clearly stated in its preamble, the petition was presented by a man who came from Skaptopara and owned property there, but was at the time serving in the imperial guard.
But even if they might be more ‘special’ than they seem, some of the cases brought to the emperor, as well as to lower-ranking Roman officials, bring into view the kind of problems faced by those inhabitants of the empire who are usually hidden from history. Through the perspective of the man at the top we can glimpse the difficulties and desperation of those at the other end of the hierarchy. Sometimes they are curious and (for a modern reader, though hardly for those concerned) engagingly colourful, from the cow killed in enemy action (p. 11) to clashes over going bird-hunting on a neighbour’s property. More often they come down to much more routine problems of taxation, inheritance, illness, debts, and so on. In one group of thirteen responses given by Septimius Severus and Caracalla in Egypt in 200 CE, two concerned loans, three inheritances, two taxation, one guardianship of orphans, and one the question of whether illness was a sufficient reason for escaping legal obligations (the other responses, such as ‘follow the decision given’ give no clue about what the original question was). But if there was one particular issue that over the centuries caused the most vociferous popular complaint, and repeatedly called for action (or at least well-meaning protestations) from the emperor, it was the official transport ‘system’. In a Roman world governed by correspondence, the mail service was one of the biggest hot spots of controversy.
Pliny breaks the rules
Essentially this was one of the problems of trying to run the infrastructure of a vast empire on a skeleton staff. Leaving aside the army, no other empire in the history of the world has operated with so few official boots on the ground (the Chinese empire had proportionately twenty times more senior administrators than did Rome). So, from the reign of Augustus, official transport and communication was largely outsourced, whether that was getting messages and men from one part of the empire to another, or prisoners, cash or wild beasts for the emperor’s shows. If you were a Roman armed with the right permit, you were allowed simply to requisition animals, carts, lodging and hospitality from the communities through which your journey passed. The potential abuses are obvious: forged permits, non-payment of any fees due, demands for service far in excess of what was allowed, and generally abusive behaviour.
For many communities in the empire, this was the day-to-day sharp end of imperial exploitation. It’s not hard to imagine what a visit from some tough, heavy-drinking couriers would be like if they showed up in your town, and it’s one of the things that formed part of the Skaptoparans’ complaint. For hundreds of years, provincials protested and emperors tried to respond. In 129 CE, for example, Hadrian claimed – his words preserved in an inscription that turned up mysteriously in the hands of a collector in Turkey in the 1990s – that he had seen for himself the poor treatment of the local people, and he (re)imposed a whole series of regulations to alleviate the problem. No wagon was to be given to anyone without a permit, all food for humans and animals was to be paid for, no local guides were to be demanded unless the roads were invisible because of snow, and so on. A few decades earlier, Nerva had actually abolished such requisitioning within Italy itself, and that abolition was celebrated on a coin minted at the time. It shows two mules happily grazing and behind them an upturned cart, no longer needed for official transportation.
This saga of ‘requisitioned transport’ (vehiculatio, more succinctly, in Latin) captures one version of the power of the emperors. They certainly appear to have listened to the pleas of their subjects and to have responded. But to judge from the repeated interventions on exactly the same topic right up to the fifth century CE, they never did enough to solve the problem. Anyway, they were happy to turn a blind eye when it suited their interests. At the very end of the book of correspondence between Pliny and Trajan, the governor writes that he had given an official permit to his wife, who wanted to visit her family in Italy after the death of her grandfather on a purely private visit that did not fall within the rules for permits at all. He later asks the emperor for special permission, backdated. ‘Of course, my dear Pliny’ is the reply. It is more than slightly unnerving that after over a hundred letters, apparently going out of their way to be punctiliously correct, the last one in the collection should show Trajan blithely giving the nod to Pliny breaking the rules on travel permits. So much for the emperors’ claims to want to eradicate the abuse.
