Emperor of Rome, page 8
History written by the winners
Matters of succession had an impact far beyond the corridors of the palace or the bedrooms of dying rulers, and still partly determine how we judge the rulers of Rome. It is impossible to understand the history of the Roman empire without thinking hard about the conflicts and controversies of regime change. These help us to explain how Roman emperors have been remembered ever since, and how their colourful, if two-dimensional, reputations as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – from the monstrous Caligula or Nero to the virtuous Trajan or Marcus Aurelius – were created. Of course, those stereotypes are as misleading as they are convenient and commonplace (the Imperial History’s biography of Elagabalus opens with a list of past emperors ‘good’ and ‘bad’, leaving no doubt where the ‘little lad from Emesa’ belonged).
In real life, emperors did not fall into such simple categories, any more than modern monarchs, presidents or prime ministers do. No ruler pleases everyone: good in whose opinion, we should always ask; or bad by what criteria? Nonetheless, the stereotypes originated at the very heart of Roman imperial culture, not so much as an accurate reflection of the qualities of the men on the throne but of the interests of those telling their story. One factor here, as we have already seen, was how well the emperor in question had got on with the class of people who wrote the histories. Whatever their popularity among the poor or among the rank-and-file soldiers, those rulers who successfully managed the potentially tricky relations with the metropolitan elite were likely to be given a positive spin. The interests of their successor and the circumstances of the succession were even more influential. The conventional story of the Roman emperors is a very particular type of ‘history written by the winners’.
One basic rule is that emperors who were followed onto the throne by their own chosen candidate ended up with a broadly favourable reputation. For the new ruler was almost bound to invest heavily in honouring the man who had put him there, and on whom his right to rule depended. Sometimes this investment extended to ensuring that his predecessor was worshipped as a god, complete with temple, priests and offerings (a particularly difficult aspect of Roman imperial society for many modern observers to take seriously, which I shall attempt to make better sense of in chapter 10). More generally, it was a question of managing the old emperor’s image and reputation. That does not necessarily mean anything quite so crude as hiring tame historians to write sympathetic accounts of him, though there might have been a little of that. It usually involved a more subtle combination of careful commemoration, selective memory, and a favourable spin placed on some of his more dubious actions. To give a simple example, all (or very nearly all) Roman emperors used the death penalty, murder or enforced suicide to remove some of their enemies; successful image management ensured that this was seen as a legitimate and proportionate response to treachery rather than a reign of terror.
And so, the ‘good’ emperors emerged. Vespasian in the first century CE was followed, peacefully, by his son Titus whom he had marked out to follow him. However well or badly Vespasian may have ruled, Titus’s position rested on being the worthy son and heir of a worthy father, and he had an enormous interest in promoting, even creating, the positive image of Vespasian. By the same logic, the series of adoptive emperors in the second century were almost inevitably committed to bolstering the reputation of the man who had officially ‘chosen’ them to succeed, however fudged or faked their adoption might have been. When Gibbon pronounced that period the happiest and most prosperous in the whole of human history, he was not only ignoring the ordinary inhabitants of the Roman empire, not to mention most of the rest of the planet, he was also overlooking just how invested those emperors were in making the rule of each of their predecessors seem happy and prosperous.
It was exactly the reverse when an emperor was assassinated or was the victim of a coup. Assassinations, both ancient and modern, happen for many reasons: from principled opposition to personal grudge or self-seeking ambition. Throughout history, ‘good’ men as well as ‘bad’ have been murdered. But whatever the circumstances, or the rights and wrongs in each case, anyone who owed their place on the throne to open conflict, coup or conspiracy (I am not talking here of stealthy, behind-the-scenes application of poison to figs), was bound to justify their right to rule by insisting that their predecessor had deserved what had happened to him. In the most extreme version of this, the new regime presided over the destruction of the fallen emperor’s statues and the striking out of his name from public documents. Sometimes, convenient omens were later circulated, apparently ‘foretelling’ the assassination and giving it divine approval (in 96 CE, for example, a talking crow is supposed to have perched on the roof of the main temple of Jupiter in Rome and helpfully squawked out what was taken to be a prophecy of Domitian’s death). Almost always, gossip, spin and allegation became ‘the official version’: each unexplained death of a prominent senator was attributed in retrospect to imperial sadism; each act of generosity reinterpreted as prodigality; and each wry joke or sharp irony, such as Caligula’s quip about his horse, turned into an exercise in malicious humiliation or a sign of madness. The impression we are meant to take away is that emperors were assassinated because they were monsters. It is equally likely that they were made into monsters because they were assassinated.
It is important not to fall into a modern revisionist trap here. I am not for a minute suggesting that all those emperors who ended up with a dagger in their back were actually upstanding statesmen who have been woefully misrepresented (the victims of undeserved character assassination as much as the real thing). Some of them may well have been very nasty pieces of work, and in the dystopian world of the imperial court it is hard to imagine that any emperor was ‘good’, still less ‘nice’, in our terms. My point is that, whatever the conduct of these rulers during their lifetime, whether in the wheeling and dealing behind palace walls, in the tricky politics of the Roman elite, or in the treatment of the rest of the empire’s population, much of their posthumous reputation was always determined – and overdetermined – by their successors, and by the sometimes messy circumstances of the succession. In the following chapters, we shall be wondering what the stereotypes of imperial vice and virtue can tell us, and why they take the form they do, and we shall enjoy puncturing, or looking beyond, a few of them (the people who regularly decorated Nero’s tomb with flowers in the years after his death presumably did not see him as the tyrant that he is often assumed to be). But the bottom line is clear: the man who followed an emperor onto the throne, and by what means, was absolutely crucial in how his predecessor has been remembered and represented in the historical tradition over the centuries.
14. Erasing the names. On this dedication to the goddess ‘Fortune’ (visible in the first line) the name of the emperor Geta has been chiselled out after his murder. This is not just about forgetting the fallen ruler; the obvious gash across the centre of the stone almost celebrates his fall.
The art of readjustment: Pliny’s past
There is more to all this, however, than the question of how history was written, and rewritten, and more to it than the immediate dangers faced at moments of transition by the innermost circles of anxious rulers, artful poisoners, ambitious heirs, loyal and disloyal servants. The difficult readjustments that came with regime change Roman-style, the new versions of the past that replaced old orthodoxies, had a powerful knock-on effect on almost all those involved in politics and administration, at least in the capital. The circumstances of succession did not impinge very much on the ordinary people in Rome or in the provinces, beyond bringing to some a welcome cash handout. Who had reached the throne, and how, hardly mattered to the local population of darkest Britannia. But in the city of Rome itself, and in the corridors of power more widely, there was a ripple effect that caught even the more distant ranks of the elite in the messy consequences of succession.
As one reign gave way to the next, loyal or collaborative senators like Pliny – and they, as I have suggested, were probably most of them – had to reinvent themselves, to fit in with the new emperor and sometimes to distance themselves clearly from the old. Cassius Dio explained how in 193 CE, when he went up to the palace to greet one of the new short-term emperors, he ‘moulded his face’ to conceal the grief he felt for the man’s predecessor (so successfully no doubt that the new man on the throne had no inkling of Dio’s ambivalence). But we can see this reinvention in action more vividly, and some of the compromises, half-truths and desperate readjustments it involved even more clearly, if we return once more to the Panegyricus. Delivered against a background of two recent regime changes, it tells us almost as much about the transfer of power from one emperor to another as it is does about Pliny’s views of the ideal ruler.
The emperor Domitian, the last of the Flavian dynasty, had been killed in 96 CE, just four years before Pliny delivered his vote of thanks, in a plot involving palace staff and the emperor’s own wife, with probably a few senators on the sidelines too. It was not a universally popular assassination; no assassinations are universally popular at the time. One apocryphal story tells how a travelling philosopher, realising that some soldiers were about to mutiny in protest at the killing, jumped naked onto a convenient altar and denounced Domitian, and so prevented the uprising. Apocryphal maybe, but it is just one hint among several that there were conflicting reactions to the coup, while also revealing a more colourful side to Roman oratory than we often imagine. (Were the troops swayed by his arguments or distracted by his performance?) Domitian’s successor, the elderly and childless Nerva, was quickly ratified by the senate, though his reign of just fifteen months might be seen as little more than an interregnum. By the time of his death, Nerva had survived at least one attempt to oust him, and had been leaned on (it is not quite clear by whom) to adopt Trajan, a successful senator and soldier, as his heir. It was only a couple of years into the new reign, and four years after the assassination of Domitian, that Trajan became the main focus of Pliny’s Speech of Praise.
But here he shared the limelight with Domitian, who is almost as much the memorable anti-hero of the speech as Trajan is the hero (figs. 7 & 8). Pliny’s Domitian was an arrogant tyrant, a cruel cheat, a thief and a murderer, laying his greedy hands on ‘every pool, lake or meadow’ in other men’s estates and positively revelling in the elimination of the most distinguished characters in Rome. No senator, or their property, was safe. They all lived in terror of the invitation to dinner in the monster’s lair, of the charges trumped up by his secret police, and finally of the ominous knock on the door. It is obvious enough that the Panegyricus was part of the process of readjustment I have been describing. Whatever praise of Domitian circulated during his lifetime (and some admiring poetry does still survive, often now hastily dismissed as ‘empty flattery’), Pliny’s condemnation was intended to obscure anything of the sort, and to create the new orthodoxy in which the tyrant Domitian was deemed rightly killed – and, more to the point, Nerva and Trajan were deemed a rightful and legitimate new deal.
But what of Pliny’s own relations with Domitian? It would be easy to get the impression, from a quick reading of his speech, that he himself had been a victim of the tyrant, a paid-up member of the ‘opposition’. It is certainly an impression that comes from some of his highly crafted, and no doubt much-edited, ‘private’ letters, which he collected and put into public circulation, and which have come down to us by that usual process of copying and recopying. It is one of these that contains his famous description of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, and of the death of his uncle, who got too close to the volcanic action. Others are more overtly political. They refer to how his ‘friends’ had been put to death or exiled under Domitian, and – looking back from the safety of the new regime – they claim that there had been ‘reason to suspect that the same fate hung over me’. One even goes so far as to state that a document was found on Domitian’s desk after his death with charges against Pliny that would have led to a trial for treason. We are meant to suppose that he had escaped by the skin of his teeth.
Not a bit of it. An unusual amount of evidence survives for Pliny’s career, both from his own writing and from the lucky find of his full CV, originally displayed in his home town of Comum (Como) in north Italy, but – in one of those complicated stories – reused to make a tomb in Milan in the Middle Ages. Never mind his claim to dissident credentials. From these sources it is absolutely clear that he did very well indeed under Domitian, climbing up the political ladder and holding major offices in the emperor’s gift. In the closing section of the Panegyricus, he himself admits as much, though he wriggles out of his embarrassment by suggesting that his career was put on hold during the very worst part of Domitian’s reign, in its final years. It is as if part of the purpose of this speech, and its later written version, was to re-position Pliny himself in the light of his own collaboration with the assassinated emperor, to reinvent himself in the post-Domitian world.
15. A gold coin of the emperor Nerva. His head is surrounded by his formal titles IMP(ERATOR) NERVA CAES(AR) AUG(USTUS) etc. On the other side is the goddess of ‘public liberty’ – no doubt intended as a symbol of Nerva’s new deal after the reign of Domitian.
Scholars have debated endlessly how harshly Pliny should be judged for this. How hypocritical was he? How economical with the truth? Can we support his claim that he had no involvement with some of the worst aspects of the reign, even if we have to re-date slightly some of the offices he held? Was Pliny a cynical collaborator who later tried to cover his tracks, or a man doing his best in a suboptimal (but no worse) regime? He has recently found both passionate detractors (he ‘would have made a career under any … despotic regime’), and more sympathetic appraisers of the tightrope he trod. But the bigger point is that Pliny was not on his own. This was not merely a personal predicament.
The historian Tacitus was also promoted by Domitian during his reign, and later performed the same volte-face, becoming a fierce critic of the emperor once he had been overthrown and almost giving the impression that he had always been one of the opposition. The senators who were Pliny’s original audience must have faced the same dilemma too. For the great majority of them had not been in any particular danger under Domitian, nor been the victims of any treason trials that the emperor may have used to attack his enemies (‘traitors’, as he would have put it). They had actually been the judge and jury, complicit in the whole procedure, however reluctant they would no doubt later claim that their participation was. If they knew that Pliny was being economical with the truth, they were not likely to call him out – because so were they. There are some similarities here with the tricky political choreography of mid-twentieth-century Europe, where some one-time Nazi collaborators managed to concoct (and shelter behind) an undercover career in the resistance. In Rome, everyone in the political hierarchy was busy realigning, cooking up excuses, adjusting to the changed circumstances, until normality was restored, with more or less the same cast of characters albeit under a new emperor. From the very beginning of the empire, the problematic business of imperial succession had often been followed by the awkward business of realignment.
Dinner with Nerva
Exactly that point is brought out in some clever repartee at a small dinner party hosted by the emperor Nerva in 97 CE, described in a letter by Pliny himself, who must have been one of the guests (though he does not explicitly say so). The conversation, he explains, turned to a Roman senator, Catullus Messalinus, who had recently died. Messalinus had been blind, extremely successful (he had held the office of consul twice) and was notorious as one of Domitian’s ‘enforcers’. The Latin word for that, delator, is a slippery term, a shorthand covering anything from unofficial ‘secret police’ or ‘informer’ (with all the modern connotations of terror) to a private prosecutor, ready to do the emperor’s dirty work for cash.
At a certain point Nerva asked the diners, who were deep in gossip about Messalinus’s bloodstained record, ‘What do we think would have happened to him if he were still alive?’ To which one of the assembled company, Junius Mauricus, who had been exiled under Domitian, quipped, ‘He’d be dining with us’. Pliny praises Mauricus’s reply for its bravery, particularly as there was at least one man with the same kind of reputation as Messalinus among the dinner guests. But the emperor’s question has usually been dismissed by most modern critics as hopelessly naive.
I suspect not. It is easy enough now to think of Nerva as a lame-duck ruler, who lasted for little more than a year on the throne and was more manipulated than manipulating. But Nerva was actually one of the first century’s great survivors. He himself had been a useful informer to the emperor Nero in the face of the attempted coup in 65 CE (in which Seneca had been implicated); he had family connections with Otho, one of the short-lived emperors of 69; and he had been consul twice, under Vespasian and Domitian. He knew exactly what the answer to his question was. And the guests knew that the answer applied to them all. Mauricus was not being brave. He was smartly summing up a central truth about Roman regime change, and how to survive it – and he was doing that to a group who had successfully survived, including the emperor himself.
And he was doing it at dinner, which is the one place where we can see the emperor in more vivid detail than anywhere else, where the tensions of imperial rule were most starkly on display, and where we can still almost savour the pros and cons of imperial generosity. So it is in the dining room – not in the senate house or on the battlefield – where we will now take our first close-up look at the emperor in action.
