Fergus Millar

Caesar Augustus : seven aspects

This book presents seven fresh and original views of Caesar Augustus, as the authors of the papers collected here consider the image which he presented of himself, how poets and historians reacted to him, the nature of his rule, and the representation of the newly established monarch among his subjects in the provinces. The contributors are well-known historians and scholars: Zvi Yavetz (Tel Aviv), Fergus Millar (Oxford), Claude Nicolet (Paris), Emilio Gabba (Pavia), Werner Eck (Cologne), Glen Bowersock (Princeton), and Jasper Griffin (Oxford). These papers were first given at a colloquium held at Wolfson College, Oxford, to celebrate the eightieth birthday of the late Sir Ronald Syme, author of The Roman Revolution (OUP 1939) and other seminal works. A substantial amount of documentation has been added in the notes, but the main texts retain the form in which they were given as lectures, and with it a freshness and immediacy in approaching a central moment in history from a number of new angles.

The World of the Golden Ass

Those who study and teach the history of the Ancient World suffer from a great disadvantage, which we find difficult to admit even to ourselves: in a perfectly literal sense we do not know what we are talking about. Of course we can dispose of a vast range of accumulated knowledge about what we are talking about. We can compile lists of officeholders in the Roman Empire, without our evidence revealing how government worked or even whether it made any impact at all on the ordinary person; we can discuss the statuses of cities and look at the archaeological remains of some of them (or rather some parts of some of them) without having any notion of their social and economic functions, or of whether it made any real difference whether an inhabitant of the Roman provinces lived in a small city or a large village.

The Political Character of the Classical Roman Republic, 200–151 B.C.

In any attempt to understand Roman history the first half of the second century B.C. must have a special place. Victory in the Hannibalic war had laid the foundations of a general dominance of the Mediterranean world, but had hardly yet produced an Empire. Outside Italy, only Sicily, Sardinia and two commands in Spain were normally allotted as provinciae for annual magistrates; and this list was not increased by the famous victories in the Greek East, Cynoscephalae, Thermopylae, Magnesia and Pydna. Roman imperialism is too crude a term for what we can observe between 200 and 151 B.C. Roman dominance was felt everywhere, from Spain to Carthage, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch and Ankara; Roman militarism was demonstrated consistently in N. Italy and Spain, at various periods in Greece and Macedonia (200–194, 191–187, 171–168), and for one period of three years in Asia Minor (190–188). Roman colonialism was still confined, with one very marginal exception, to the Italian peninsula.

Politics, Persuasion and the People before the Social War (150–90 B.C.)

The purpose of this paper is to present a particular model of how Roman politics worked, and of what Roman politics before the Social War was ‘about’. In essence I want to place in the centre of our conception the picture of an orator addressing a crowd in the Forum; a picture of someone using the arts of rhetoric to persuade an anonymous crowd about something. The most important subject of oratory, and the most important fundamental right exercised by whoever came to vote, was legislation. Yet the greatest of all the extraordinary distortions which have been imposed on our conception of Republican politics in the twentieth century is that the process of legislation, and the content of the legislation passed by the people, have both ceased to be central to it. With that we have ceased to listen sufficiently to the actual content of oratory addressed to the people, to the arguments from rights, from the necessities of the preservation of the res publica , from historical precedents, both Roman and non-Roman, and from social attitudes and prejudices. In the second century above all, we can see how the prestige which the office-holding class derived from family descent and personal standing on the one hand was matched on the other by popular demands for appropriate conduct, and by popular suspicions of private luxury, of profiteering from the conduct of public affairs, and of improper collaboration with wrong-doers both at home and abroad.

Emperors, Frontiers and Foreign Relations, 31 b.c. to a.d. 378 *

Severus…. was in the habit of saying that he had gained a large additional territory and made it a bulwark for Syria. But the facts themselves show that it is a source of continual wars for us, and of great expenses. For it provides very little revenue and involves very great expenditure; and having extended our frontiers to the neighbours of the Medes and Parthians, we are constantly so to speak at war in their defence.’ So writes Cassius Dio about the extension of the Eastern frontier in the 190s and the creation of the provinces of Mesopotamia and Osrhoene. The significance of the passage however, extends beyond the question of the Eastern frontier itself at that moment. Written by an ex-consul, and former assessor of Severus, it reveals two types of justification for conquest uttered by the Emperor himself - one straightforwardly imperialistic, the other strategic; and a critique of this from two points of view, the balance of income and expenditure, and the wider strategic commitments incurred. Whether Dio had formulated such views already in Severus’ reign we cannot know; this section of his History will have been written at the earliest towards 220, and probably later. If he had, we have no reason to think that he expressed them to Severus. If he did, it can only have been after the event, for his own narrative at this point makes clear that the new province of Mesopotamia was entrusted to an eques , and an ‘honour’ (the status of colonia ) given to Nisibis, either after the campaign of 195, or (less probably) after that of 198, in neither of which Dio himself took part. None the less, the fact that the passage retails both the authentic views of an Emperor and a critique of them by a consularis may encourage us to ask some general questions: how, by whom and within what conceptual frameworks were the foreign and frontier ‘policies’ of the Empire formulated?

Paul of Samosata, Zenobia and Aurelian: the Church, Local Culture and Political Allegiance in Third-Century Syria

What we call the ‘Eastern frontier’ of the Roman Empire was a thing of shadows, which reflected the diplomatic convenience of a given moment, and dictated the positioning of some soldiers and customs officials, but hardly affected the attitudes or the movements of the people on either side. Nothing more than the raids of desert nomads, for instance, hindered the endless movement of persons and ideas between Judaea and the Babylonian Jewish community. Similarly, as Lucian testifies, offerings came to the temple of Atargatis at Hierapolis-Bambyce from a wide area of the Near and Middle East, including Babylonia. The actual movement to and fro of individuals was reflected, as we have recently been reminded, in a close interrelation of artistic and architectural styles. Moreover, whatever qualifications have to be made in regard to specific places, it is incontestable that Semitic languages, primarily Aramaic in its various dialects, remained in active use, in a varying relationship to Greek, from the Tigris through the Fertile Crescent to the Phoenician coast. This region remained, we must now realize, a cultural unity, substantially unaffected by the empires of Rome or of Parthia or Sassanid Persia.

Government and Diplomacy in the Roman Empire during the First Three Centuries

diplomacy of the Roman Empire in the period of its greatest extent and stability, let us say until towards the middle of the third century ad, has received very little attention. A recent collection of studies on ancient diplomacy ignores it altogether.1 It is true that in this period the Empire faced no major external threat, and remarkably few significant internal revolts. The great Jewish revolt of ad 66, culminating in the siege of Jerusalem in 70, which absorbed almost one-seventh of the entire Roman army, offers a clear indication of how much the Empire owed to the absence of national identities within its borders.2 The period of stability ended precisely with the overthrow in the 220s of the relatively weak Parthian empire, centred on Babylonia, and the rise of what was to become a serious external threat, the new Persian dynasty, the Sassanians or Sassanids. Observers in the Roman Empire were immediately conscious of how much had changed. Near the end of his great Roman History in eighty books, which began with the arrival of Aeneas in Italy and concluded with his own second consulship in 229, Cassius Dio writes (lxxx, 3, 1-4, Loeb trans.) :

Local Cultures in the Roman Empire: Libyan, Punic and Latin in Roman Africa

No subject in the history of the Roman Empire has more significance or more pitfalls than that of the local cultures of the provinces. The evidence is in each case, with the exception of Judaea and Egypt, relatively slight, disparate and ambiguous. But, on the one hand, the subject has very real attractions, which may lead to the building of vast but fragile historical theories, attempting to bring the distinctive culture of an area into a schematic relationship with events such as political movements or the spread of Christianity. On the other, we can never escape the possibility that the denial of the survival of a significant local culture may be falsified by new evidence; even worse, a local culture may have existed in a form which left no written records or datable artefacts. Yet the problem must be faced, not only for the intrinsic interest which such cultures present, but for the light the enquiry sheds on Graeco-Roman civilization itself. We might conclude for one area that Graeco-Roman culture remained the merest facade, for another that it completely obliterated a native culture. More commonly, we will find a mixture or co-existence of cultures. In such a situation, again, the local element might have been culturally and socially insignificant, or, as it was in Egypt and in Judaea, embodied in a coherent traditional civilization with its own language, literature, customs, religion and (in Egypt) art-forms.

Empire and City, Augustus to Julian: Obligations, Excuses and Status

The early Roman Empire rested on a network of cities, which were capable both of conspicuous expenditure locally, in the form of public buildings, shows and festivals, and of carrying many of the functions of government; but by the fourth century their capacity to perform these roles had drastically declined. Both the capacity and the decline depended in part on the availability or inavailability of the richer classes to undertake expenditures associated with public offices or with liturgies. These remarks are of course mere commonplaces. They have become so, in the first place, because precisely these changes were noted, and the issues relating to them consciously formulated, in the fourth century itself. So Libanius writes in his Funeral Oration for Julian: He showed the same care also in relation to the councils in the cities, which formerly flourished in both numbers and wealth, but by that time had come to nothing, since their members, except for a very few, had switched course, some into military service, some into the Senate … The remainder were all but sunk, and for the majority of them undertaking public services ( to leitourgein ) ended in beggary. Yet who does not know that the vitality of its council is the soul of a city ? But Constantius, while in theory aiding the councils, in practice was their enemy, by moving elsewhere men who sought to evade them, and granting illegal exemptions ( ateleiai ). Three points should be noted here: Libanius assumes an evolution which was, if not universal, at any rate general throughout the Empire; the crisis is regarded as having been caused by the availability of roles or statuses which offered an alternative to the obligations of city councillors ; and this availability itself is seen as a product of imperial actions, which (as Libanius goes on to say) Julian had taken steps to reverse.

Triumvirate and Principate

More than thirty years after its publication The Roman Revolution still stands unrivalled, not as the ‘definitive’ account of the emergence of a monarch from the ruins of the Republic but as something far more than that, the demonstration of a new method in the presentation of historical change. The aspect of this method, which has found most imitation, is of course prosopography; and it is indeed essential to it. But far more important is the use made of contemporary literature to mirror events, and to analyse and define the concepts and the terms in which the events were seen by those who lived through them. It is the common characteristic, perhaps even the definition, of great works of history that they invite imitation and offer a challenge, not just to apply their methods and standards to other areas, but to pursue their own conclusions further. The present paper is gratefully offered as an attempt to portray with a different emphasis some aspects of the establishment of Octavian as a monarch, first by demonstrating the extent to which the institutions of the res publica remained active in the Triumviral period, and secondly by redefining the change which culminated in 27 B.C., precisely by asking again in what terms it and the novus status which emerged from it were seen by contemporaries.