The new triumvirate arrangement later fell apart. When the governor of Gaul died, Octavian added that province to his sphere of influence and gradually consolidated his personal hold on Italy while being aided by competent and experienced military commanders. Lepidus attempted to gain a greater share in the empire by trying to raise a revolt against Octavian in Sicily, but found that his troops would not fight against Octavian. Lepidus was forced out his position, and was allowed to retire in obscurity. Meanwhile, Octavian did not approve of how Cleopatra VII talked about how her son Caesarion was Caesar’s true heir, and sent Marcus Antonius to deal with her. In fact, she dealt with him and they began living together in Alexandria where she manipulated him into order to maintain the integrity and independence of her kingdom, while he needed her financial support, and it was reported to Octavian that Antonius and Cleopatra were planning to make themselves rulers of Rome. Octavian persuaded the Senate to declare war on Cleopatra, and he was accordingly able to advance against Antonius who was portrayed as a traitor to Rome. Octavian moved by sending a fleet that defeated Cleopatra and Antonius’s ships at the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C. on the west coast of Greece.
Octavian proceeded to occupy the eastern provinces and landed in Egypt in the following year, and formally annexed the country. Anthony and Cleopatra then killed themselves, and Egypt was made into a Roman territory. With Anthony overthrown, Octavian acquired unchallenged power over the entire Roman empire upon his return to Rome, he chose to relinquish all of his powers and commands of the legions under his control to the Senate on 13 January 27 B.C. The Senate in turn reacted by returning these powers to him, along with full control over the legions and provinces of Cyprus, Cilica, Egypt, Syria, Hispania, and Gaul for ten years in the interest of restoring order and stability, and was made Augustus, making him the emperor in practice and Princeps as the head of the Senate, on 16 January 27 B.C. Further powers were bestowed upon him during the following years until his death in 14 B.C., that would shift Rome from being a republic toward becoming an empire under his successor, his adopted son Tiberius. Augustus also established the Praetorian Guard in and around Rome as his personal military force. It was then commonly believed that peace had finally come after the long years of civil war and disorder when Octavian returned to Italy, and believed that one supreme ruler was necessary for the control of the vast Roman empire. There was therefore no further major opposition to Octavian, with two more years being spent eliminating pockets of resistance. He then devoted the remaining forty-seven years of his life to giving the empire the efficient organization and good government that it had lacked. His most difficult task was to alter the old form of the state to legalise the position of the government that had been taken by military force.
Octavian officially proclaimed the restoration of the republic on 13 January 27 B.C., while in actual practice, true power lay in his hands. The Senate thereupon officially gave him command of the army and the control of the most important frontier provinces of Spain, Gaul, and Syria, and thereby assuring his control over nearly all of the army, or twenty out of twenty-six legions, and correspondingly reducing the danger of civil war between rival armies. The other provinces would be governed by the Senate as before. Besides these vast powers, he also held the important rights of a tribune, on which he chiefly based his right to power for ten years. At the same time, the Senate conferred upon him the title of “Augustus Caesar,” meaning great, powerful and revered. His chief official title was Princeps, meaning “first citizen,” and the title Imperator, meaning military commander, but in fact, emperor in actual practice. The Roman Empire was thus organized under a double government of the Senate and of the Princeps that was in fact the emperor, and who was the real ruler because the legions were behind him, thus putting an end to a government by the Roman people. For four years, he rested his authority on consecutive terms as consul, and after 23 B.C. held a life position as tribune. The reign of Augustus thus represents the fulcrum of Roman history, as there had been the republic before him, and then only emperors after him.
The shift from republic to empire were marked by a series of developments throughout Roman history. The initial conquests of neighbouring regions brought excessive power and wealthy to a minority, while the majority were reduced to poverty. The Senate that represented the wealthy minority, in which Senators were obliged to possess a million sesterce at a time when a daily wage for unskilled labour was four sesterces, became corrupt and oppressive, and also too weak to maintain order in Rome or protect the provinces. The Gracci later a city mob as a revolutionary force that set aside the authority of the Senate. However, the army as was soon reformed by Marius could be used to overthrow the government, which Sulla first used as a military instrument for political purposes. Pompey is his war against pirates and Midthidates show the Roman world the benefit of one-man rule, which then led the rule of a Caesar was a monarchy, but it could be preserved in the face of having powerful enemies. The Senate failed to recover its authority, and the civil wars that ensued led to the maintenance of an imperial ruler.
While much of his way of running Rome was really a continuation of the main themes of republican history with campaigns of conquest to extend direct Roman rule across half of Europe and civic building, Augustus Caesar also reformed the Roman state, society and culture. This began with a program of renewal that involved making the Senate a useful subordinate. The number of Senators was reduced to 800 from over a 1000, eliminating the unfit and incompetent, and making membership hereditary while continuing to appoint individuals of personal integrity, ability and wealth who formed the core of Augustus’s supporters. He also shared the governance of the empire with the renewed Senate, which named governors to the peaceful provinces, while Augustus named commanders to the frontier imperial provinces were most of the legions were stationed, who were chosen among the Senators. The Senate also served as a court of law in important cases.
Augustus undertook an even more fundamental reform of the equites. He began to rebuild their ranks, and they became the foundation of the imperial administration and the backbone of the officer corps. Freemen and soldiers who acquired sufficient wealth moved into the order, while the most successful were promoted into the Senate, but they were removed from politics. They could no longer collect taxes, and as a result, the former abuses of tax collectors in the provinces were greatly restricted. However, the problem of urban poverty continued growing. There remained the problems of overcrowding, and employment was difficult to find since free labourers competed against slaves. A fraction of the poor thus continued to be provided by the state with a basic dole of wheat of thirty-three kilograms a month, and also benefited from the facilities of the city, including aqueducts providing water, baths, and arenas, such as the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus, served as mass gatherings that replaced the plebeian assemblies of the republic while living in Rome was a difficult daily struggle in substandard housing and amid rampant pollution. In spite of the reforms, not all were prosperous, and one of the best means of escaping poverty became enlisting in the military.
Augustus used his personal wealth that he had acquired from confiscating the property of his enemies to pension off 32 legions in different colonies he purchased for them throughout the empire. The remaining 28 legions became a permanent professional army stationed in the provinces, and provided retired professionals with land and cash after twenty years of enlistment paid for from a dedicated military treasury held in the emperor’s hands. He provided a cash payment to those soldiers who had served for more than twenty years, and thus secured their loyalty to the Roman state and not to their generals. With the approval of the Senate, new taxes were established to pay soldiers’ wages and discharge bonuses. Non-citizens were recruited into auxiliary units to serve for twenty-five years, and upon retirement were rewarded with colonies and Roman citizenship. These measures created a permanent solution to the problem of citizen-soldier of the late republic, and colonies of veterans helped “romanise” the provinces of the empire and remained an integral part of the Roman state, and soldiers were also hereafter mainly recruited from the provinces. The subjugation and reorganisation of Gaul by the Romans also brought them into contact with Germanic tribes, which combined old culture and new courage that integrated new influences. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa allowed a powerful tribe of the Subi were to settle on the left bank of the Rhine in 39 B.C., where German priests performed Roman pagan rites. Agripina, the mother of Nero, founded a colony of Roman veterans there, which became the city of Cologne in less than three generations later.
Augustus Caesar’s renewal of Rome also rested on a religious reform, including in 17 B.C. with celebrating three days of sacrifices, processions, sacred games and theatre performances known as the secular games in order to mark the beginning of a new age. He assumed the office of pontifex maximus, or leader of spiritual life, and used it to reinvigorate Roman religion, restoring numerous temples and reviving ancient Roman cults firstly in order to restore the traditions of Roman piety, morality, sacred order, and faith in relationship between the gods and Roman destiny after decades of violence that gripped public authority. A second goal was to promote his own cult, as his ancestor Julius Caesar was deified after his death, and therefore benefited from this association. His guiding spirit received special devotion in temples. The emperor became identical with the state, and state religion was akin to emperor worship. After his death, Augustus and virtually all of the emperors after him were worshipped as official deities of Rome.
Augustus Caesar also adopted the policy of organizing and strengthening the empire against recurring waves of barbarians. This included a long series of campaigns, extending the boundaries of the Empire north to the Danube and pacifying northwestern Spain, and east of the Rhine River, which he named Germania, which was separate from Celtic Gaul, where Roman rule had been consolidated by 20 B.C., including between the upper Rhine and the Loire. During a time when not any armed Germanic tribe openly opposed the Romans and it became common for Germans to serve as Roman soldiers, the Romans extended their influences into their territories in western and southern Germania, and established new cities as they pressed into Germanic territories, they set up markets around the Roman military camps and various settlements, in which they introduced its laws and institutions, aiming at establishing a permanent presence and undermine the German tribes traditional way of life while becoming assimilated into the Roman empire, which they sought to continually expand into new Germanic territories. The Romans established their influence in German regions, as several tribes became their allies, while the Danube and Rhine rivers would effectively become the permanent boundaries between the Roman empire and the Germanic barbarians, although the Romans under the emperor’s stepsons Tiberius and Drusus launched new invasions into the Alps into Germanic territory east of the Rhine. Drusus extended Roman authority as far as the Elbe in 9 B.C. Tiberius would eventually establish Germania into a Roman province by 6 B.C., which would remain pacified for fifteen years though implementing policies of division and control between the various Germanic tribes, and were often able to use hostages, bribes and alliances to keep them pitted against each other.
The Roman authorities sought to subdue local Germanic populations by imposing taxes and legal systems, confiscating weapons, and taking some sons of Germanic leaders as hostages to be raised in Rome as Romans with the purpose of returning them to Germania as loyal and cooperative Roman subjects. Germanic leaders were conscious of these subtle forms of degradation, especially in terms of being subject to Roman law. Arminius, a son of a Germanic Cheruscan chieftain, was one of the hostages taken to Rome during the ongoing effort to subdue the Germanic tribes where the Roman settled in Germania. He had served in the Roman military and had become a Roman citizen, and later led a unified major revolt against further Roman incursions.
However, the Roman general Publius Quintilius Varus, the Roman governor of Germania, alienated them when he came to Germany in 6 A.D. by recklessly and violently treating the Germans as a thoroughly subdued population, and began to rule as he had formerly done with the eastern subjects of Rome. He introduced heavy taxes that were collected by force, overturned all of the native forms of law by adjudicating all matters in Roman courts in Latin, which was not yet understood by the local populations, and even claimed the right to put Germanic freemen to death for what were considered to be trivial matters. Arminius, who had served in the Roman army and therefore knew Roman military strategies and weaknesses, resolved to win back Germanic people’s freedom from distress through uniting them with the secret support of local chiefs who sought an opportune time to secretly form of union of separate tribes to strike back against the Romans with whom they had been in conflict for seventy years, and made their final attempt to extend the empire into Germania in present-day northwestern Germany. Arminius as the lord of his Cheruscan tribe found his followers and all of the neighbouring tribes remained divided seeking revenge against Roman rule. He then organised a conspiracy among them that could be called into collective action. When Varus was told to purge a revolt by a northern tribe in 9 A.D., Arminius lured these Roman legions into the depths of the Teutoburger Forest where they could not fight a pitched battle in an environment of thick woods, mountainous terrain, narrow valleys and not any beaten paths that he knew well, and made communications nearly impossible, which therefore diminished the Romans’ advantages. While they were hemmed in on all sides, Arminius led his Germanic followers against them in separate ambush attacks, in which they slaughtered the 17th, 18th and 19th legions constituting at least 15,000 men along with 5,000 auxiliaries in a three-day battle in which they could hardly defend themselves in their heavy armour and moving over slippery ground without open spaces.
Rome suddenly lost ten percent of its military might. Rome then shifted five legions to the Rhine River to guard against Arminius and the Cheruscans, and created a Sixth Legion from forced recruitment in Roman jails, pubs and brothels for a similar deployment north of the Alps. For two years, beginning in 14 A.D., Germanicus, the great nephew of Augustus Caesar, led these forces in a bitter campaign of attrition across the Weser River in 14, 15, and 16, but he could not bring Arminius to a decisive battle before he was recalled by his successor emperor Tiberius, and the Romans never tried to conquer German territory following the earlier “Varian disaster.” Apart from dispatching this revenge attack expedition into Germania, the Romans retreated to the Rhine frontier, which became the permanent border between the Roman empire and the territories of the northwestern Germanic communities, where the former Roman judges, lawyers and civil representatives were eliminated.
Meanwhile the Mediterranean world now entered a new age of prosperity and development. Within the Empire, he sought to provide honest and efficient government. The appointment of the governors of the provinces drawn from the Senate now rested solely with this emperor, and they knew they were responsible to him for the wise and honest management of their territory. A governor also knew that they were responsible to him for the wise and honest management of their territory. A governor also knew that if he proved successful, he could hold his post for years or be promoted to a better one. There thus grew up a body of experienced and capable officials in the provinces under the permanent control of Augustus and his successors, but the problem of succession to Augustus Caesar was never satisfactorily solved.
After his death in 14, four descendants in his family, either by blood or adoption, were to rule for more than another fifty years and filled out the first century of peace while preventing the outbreak of civil war. However, the political life of Rome was often marked by dysfunctional emperors. There was Tiberius, his wife Livia’s son by her first husband, who ruled from 14 to 37 with the powers conferred upon him by his stepfather, without any time limit. He gave the provinces wise and efficient governors and showed himself to be a skilled and successful ruler. However, he became violently paranoid about treachery within his administration as he got older, and accused innocent people of treason. This went on until he left governing to his henchman Sejanus and went off to Capri to mainly live a life of sexual debauchery and threw unwanted visitors off a cliff until he was eventually probably murdered. He was succeeded by Gaius Germanicus, or “Caligula”, who ruled from 37 to 41 He was Livia’s great-grandson and was known to lead a career of drunkenness and debauchery. He was completely insane, as indicated by how he convinced himself he was the god Jupiter, had an affair with his sister and killed her, declared he wished that all Romans had one neck so he could cut it off, and appointed his favourite horse a priest and a consul. He was eventually killed by his own guards. He was succeeded by Caligula’s uncle Claudius, who ruled from 41 to 54, and was appointed emperor because the praetorian guards found him cowering behind a curtain after they had killed Caligula, and the Senate was obliged to consent, and thus revealing the bare military basis of imperial rule.
Claudius sought to redress his craven reputation, and sought to engage in imperial conquests, akin to his dynastic ancestors. He is credited with the final subjugation of Gaul, and invading Britain in 43 in an intervention on behalf of Briton Roman allies in southeastern Britain who were threatened by a neighbouring Briton kingdom, following Julius Caesar’s incursions into the southern regions prior to returning to Rome to deal with increasing troubles there. The initial permanent Roman settlement in present day southeastern England was established thereafter as a result of this invasion aiming at the conquest of Britain, following Julius Ceasar’s earlier attempts, as Claudius sought to exert his influence as the emperor through accomplishing this prestigious achievement of extending the empire at the edge of the known world. The kingdom of Cunobelinus based in Camulodunum in eastern Britain disintegrated upon his death, and led to the outbreak of a civil war. Exiled dispossessed chieftains appealed to Claudius for intervention, to which Claudius agreed on the pretext of creating alliances with them, and exploiting the chronic disorder in Britain to achieve easy conquests while needing to establish a military reputation. An armed expedition was dispatched in 43 A.D., to which the Britons were unable to stage effective resistance, and extended Roman influence in southern Britain under his able general Aulus Plautius, who secured the conquest of most of Britain within four years, which was followed by Roman colonists when Londinium rapidly became the local commercial centre and transportation hub for roadways extending westward and northward. Claudius also annexed the former client kingdoms of Mauretania and Thrace into Roman provinces. He also devoted himself to the affairs of the empire, such as extending citizenship to the inhabitants of the romanised western provinces, and vastly expanding the imperial bureaucracy, transferring one function after another from the Senate to the emperor’s sphere of function.
Claudius’s wife and niece Agrippina eventually poisoned him, and who also displaced his son Britannicus to obtain succession to the throne for her own son, Nero, who ruled from 54 to 68 A.D., under whose reign St. Paul and St. Peter were martyred for Christianity. He initially ruled jointly with his mother, but he had her killed by sabotaging a boat she was on and she swam to the shore his henchmen bashed her head in with oars. He also killed Claudius’s son Brittanicus for being a rival heir, murdered his wife Octavia, and kicked his pregnant second wife Poppaea to death. He then promptly proposed to Claudius’s daughter and killed her when she turned him down, as well as killing many other innocent and deserving men around him as a result of his cowardly and suspicious nature. After the great fire of 64 A.D., he took full advantage of it by blaming the Christians and had hundreds of them put to death. He also built a huge palace for himself on the ruins that he called the Golden House. He fancied himself as a poet, actor, dancer and charioteer, but Romans found his exhibitionism very undignified. His treatment of the only able men around him deprived him of support, and then the provinces began to be aroused by heavy taxation. This discontent finally broke out in open revolt, and in 68 A.D., commanders of rebellious troops in Gaul, Spain and Africa marched on Rome. Nero then went into hiding, and on hearing that the Senate had voted for his death, he slit his own throat. Peace in Rome then ended, as several Roman commanders then struggled for the throne for about a year after Nero’s death, and threatened to involve the empire in another long civil war.
There was a confused power struggle after Nero’s death with three emperors in one year, with the one coming to the fore being a successful general who had made his name fighting in Judae, Vespacian, a very able commander in the east who the Senate declared emperor in 69 A.D. He began a second century of peace under a line of able emperors who brought the empire to its greatest prosperity. The main task of the emperors at this time was to strengthen the defences on the frontiers in the east and the north where it was open to attack. The shifting Germanic tribes constantly threatened the northern frontiers, while in the east the frontier on the Euphrates was continually made unsafe by the Parthians, who were the only civilized power still unconquered by Rome.
Sporadic warfare against the Celtic Britons as the Romans extended their influence north and westward in Britain, while also experiencing the results of corrupt Roman public officials during the reigns of Claudius and Nero who exploited the local population. A notable revolt was led by Queen Boudicca of the Britton Iceni tribe in the region of present day Norfolk, who led a uprising of uncommonly united Britons composed of thee Trinobantes and other neighbours to the south against the conquering forces of the Roman Empire in 60-61 in an attempt to drive them and their local collaborators out of Britain in protest against Roman material demands on the local populations. They overwhelmed the recently established colony at Gamulodonum, Verulamium and Londunum, until they were held by Roman resistance at the Thames River, and ultimately pacified southern Britain.
This revolt led to the Romans reinforcing their presence in Britain, and reforming provincial administrations with a new order in Britannia to reconcile the local populations with to Roman rule. Vespasian appointed Gnaeus Julius Agricola in 71 as the commander of the Twentieth Legion to impose order against another revolt in northern present-day England. Agricola completed the pacification of the Briton Celts, including completing the conquest of the western highlands and present-day Wales in approximately 76, prior to becoming appointed the consul and governor of Britannia in 78. Northern England to the south and north of the Clyde and the Forth was pacified by 80. During this time, Britannia was increasingly romanised with building Roman infrastructure in this province, such as temples and public baths. Forts and roads were constructed across much of the lowlands in the interior of present-day Scotland from 79 to prevent incursions from the Caledonians.
Roman control over Britain was eventually consolidated by establishing as a Roman province in 80, which was divided into seventeen states under the governance of the laws of the empire. Agricola would continue advancing further northward into present day Scotland until 84 to subdue the Caledonians, or Picts, who were the only population who remained defying Roman authority in Britain. Roman legions would then be withdrawn southward in Caledonia when it proved impossible to hold or fortify the highlands. Meanwhile, greater numbers of forces to contain the growing power of the Dacians in the Balkans between 86 and 88, as well as facing other threats north of Italy from the Quadi and Marcomanni and Suebi Germanic confederations, which reduced the numbers of Roman legions in Britain by twenty-five percent. Roman Britain therefore remained subject to incursions Caledonians and the Picts inhabiting the territories south of the highlands, far from the Roman heartland in an already overextended empire.
The Flavian dynasty of Vespasian and then his two sons as successors Titus (79-81) and Domitian (81-96) contributed to reinforcing the frontier lines on the continent by building walls and fortifications between 69 and 96. Meanwhile, internal political turmoil remained. The Senate remained opposed to the rule of Domitian, in which some of whom developed a theory of government that asserted hereditary power was fundamentally wrong, and proposed that each emperor should choose the best man from among the Senators as his successor. Vespasian had defied this theory by passing power down to Titus, followed by Domitian, who resorted freely to executing recalcitrant Senators until he was assassinated in 96. Henceforth, the empire was governed by “adoptive” emperors, beginning with the emperor Trajan, who was adopted by the Senator Nerva who succeeded to the throne. Trajan then embarked on a series of wars to defend the empire more effectively by driving wedges into the territory of threatening barbarians. He met the whole threatening situation on the lower Danube, who captured one stronghold of the Dacians after another, and in two wars finally destroyed their capital.
Having built a massive stone bridge across the Danube, Trajan made Dacia a Roman province and settled numerous Roman colonies on the north side of the river, principally settled by Roman veterans. Trajan then turned his attention to the eastern frontier, where a large part of the boundary was formed by the upper Euphrates River. While Rome held Mesopotamia in the western half of the Fertile Crescent, it had never conquered the eastern half, which was held by the kingdom of the Parthians. Trajan attempted to add this territory to his empire, but he failed before he died in 117 at the end of his nineteen year reign, when the Roman empire reached its greatest territorial extent, following the earlier territorial conquests that had spanned for over eight hundred years.
Trajan’s successor Hadrian, who ruled from 117 to 138, decided that the empire should stay within its established boundaries to be governed effectively due to the extent of the communications and administrative capabilities of the time. He therefore did not make any efforts to continue Trajan’s conquests in the east, and also relinquished some of Trajan’s conquest brought the frontier back to the Euphrates. He also strengthened the whole northern frontier with a continuous wall reaching from the Rhine to the Danube where the empire was exposed to attack by Germanic tribes. A similar wall was built along a boundary north of the Tyne, and therefore marked the northern boundary of Roman Britain by building the 135 kilometre long Hadrian’s Wall in 122 from the Clyde to the Firth of Forth to deter further incursions by the Picts to the north, which marked a southward retreat to this defensible line following costly campaigns against them, and therefore became the northernmost extent of Roman influence in Britain, as well as controlling trade between this north-south division.
In addition to securing the defences of the empire’s boundaries, Hadrian also improved a system of government departments, headed by efficient ministers with the complete control of these departments in his own hands, thus increasing his own power while ensuring internal stability. One of the most important changes was taxes being collected by private individuals for profit. Government tax collectors now gathered taxes everywhere. Subjects of the empire were also controlled by the same laws, with the lawyers of Rome being the most able that the world had ever seen. The law of the city of Rome was altered to meet the needs of the whole empire.
Antonius Pius, who followed Hadrian and ruled from 138 B.C. to 161, maintained that an accused person must be held innocent until proven guilty, which has since been handed down to modern times. Construction of an Antonine Wall during the reign of Antoninus Pius in the Clyde river-Firth of Forth region as a second line of defensive fortifications to the north of Hadrian’s wall in 142, to contain the Caledonians while waging war against the Picts was abandoned over the next twenty years with occasional re-occupations, with the final attempts to subdue the Picts and the complete subjugation of Britain being staged under emperor Septimius Severus being inconclusive, with the Roman legions withdrawing back to Hadrian’s Wall that marked the final boundary of the Roman empire in Britain that was primarily established as a military occupation with four major colonies set up in Camulodunum, Clevum, Eboracum and Lindim, in which local populations living outside the Roman military camp cities remained apart from Roman settlers and did not constitute a uniform nationality. Any plans to invade Hibernia, present day Ireland, inhabited by Gaels, never materialised as being too remote, and was also a safe haven for Britons fleeing Roman rule. Caracalla succeeded Septimius Severus upon his death in 211, and issued an edict during the following year stating that all free men were entitled to full Roman citizenship, which contributed to the end of Roman expansion, as newly-Romanised peoples were devoid of incentive to join the Roman military, in the interest of acquiring the benefits of patronage and social advancement, and thus their active involvement in the social, economic and cultural life of the empire was unnecessary as they eventually regained their independence.
In terms of domestic advancements, the Romans constructed many impressive projects. Great progress was made throughout the empire in the communication from one part to another with roads paved with smooth stone and bridges, as well as freedom on the sea from pirates, with good harbours that were provided everywhere with docks and lighthouses. The Roman empire also enjoyed unprecedented wealth and prosperity. Business flourished, with good roads leading merchants to trade beyond the frontiers and find new markets, with imports and exports that extended from England to China. There was a fleet of a hundred and twenty ships that sailed regularly across the Indian Ocean between the Red Sea and India. This new prosperity allowed the Romans to have over 130 holidays a year to enjoy festivals, races at the Circus Maximus, or the gladitorial games at the Coliseum. Throughout Rome and the towns of the provinces, there were public buildings, monuments and aqueducts for water supply everywhere. There were fountains, theatres, music halls, baths, gymnasiums and schools that were erected by wealthy men and given to the community.
Roman education advanced as well, borrowing a great deal of knowledge from the Greeks, but unlike the Greeks who generally focused on theory, the Romans looked to the practical. The theories of the Greek physician Galen were systemized, and formed the basis of Roman medical science. The work of the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy was perfected and formed the basis of Roman astronomy. Both boys and girls were afforded the opportunity to go to school, with teachers paid by the government, which superseded the Roman custom of the father instructing his own children. This was superseded by parents sending their children to schools that freed Greek slaves were beginning to open in Rome, even if the classes were held in the open air on a side street or a corner of the Forum. At best, they met in a bare room belonging to a dwelling house before there were schoolhouses. In other cases, an educated Greek slave might become the tutor of the children of a household. On occasion, great Greek teachers appeared and lectured in Rome, thus affording young Roman patricians the opportunity of studying rhetoric and public speaking, which would be of great practical use in the career of public office.
During this time of Pax Romana, or Roman Peace defining an age of prosperity and relative peace that had begun with Octavian and lasted for about two hundred years, a new religion, Christianity, was established during the reign of Tiberius and eventually changed the face of Rome and all of western civilization. The hitherto Roman state religion worshipped the emperor, and various gods and goddesses of the Roman pantheon. This meant it was a Roman citizen’s duty to perform the appropriate rituals to ensure peace and tranquility in the empire, without necessarily believing in them, while the Romans were tolerant of other religions. For example, the Jewish people of Judea were given certain freedoms, including a degree of religious freedom, and self-rule until 6 B.C., when the Roman sent a procurator to rule the nation of Judea by which self-rule was revoked. This caused widespread unrest, and three groups emerged – the Sadducees who favoured cooperation with the Romans, the Essenes who preferred to wait for a Messiah or Saviour to save them from Rome, and Zealots who wanted an immediate overthrow of Roman rule.
Jesus of Nazareth was born during this time, and when He left his parents’ home, and went on to preach for about three years, during which time He spread a new message to the Jewish people about the importance of individuals’ transforming themselves, such as the new commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself. Unlike religious preachers before Him, He claimed that was the Son of God Himself. He was well received by the Jewish people, but not the Jewish priests, who saw Him as a rival that needed to be silenced. When He brought his message to the capital, Jerusalem, he was detained and denounced for his teachings by a Jewish court, and was crucified by the Roman authorities who only abided by the Jewish court’s conviction to appease provincial politics, although He had not committed any crime under Roman law.
His death by crucifixion did not stop his teachings from spreading. His followers claimed he had risen from the dead, which was also unlike any other religious preacher before Him. Inspired by their beliefs, His followers spread His teachings across the Mediterranean rim using Roman roads and trade routes, which was followed by non-Jews converting to the new faith. A Jewish tentmaker of Tarsus named Paul became the leading Christian missionary, preaching the new gospel in the cities of Asia Minor and Greece and eventually in Rome itself, and Christian churches, or assemblies, began to spring up along the way. Some of Paul’s letters to the churches had had founded were widely circulated. There were eventually four accounts in Greek of the life and teachings of Jesus that came to be accepted as true. These were the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which came to be called the Four Gospels. These along with Paul’s letters and some other early Christian writings, including books of revelations, were brought together to form the New Testament. Together with the version of Jewish Scripture in use in Greek-speaking Jewish communities, these books constituted the Christian Bible.
Other religions from the east did not seem to offer their followers the consolation and fellowship of a life so exalted and beautiful, and full of appeal and human sympathy as that of Christianity. Both slave and free, the rich and the poor, and the despised eagerly listened to this new “mystery” from the east. As time passed, multitudes learned of the new gospel and found joy in the hopes that it awakened, and rapidly outpaced beliefs in the other religions of the Roman empire, which had involved believing in deities that were indifferent to the plight of humans without compassion for them, and therefore since they could not be trusted, had to be placated. Christianity promised radically unprecedented beliefs about expressing love for others, and the son of Almighty God was sent to bring an ultimate reconciliation between God and humanity by redeeming them, and would be offered attaining a new and perfect life in the world to come.
The Romans during the first and second centuries had initially dismissed Christians as merely composing one of several heretical Jewish sects who refused to worship the emperor as a god, and seemed to threaten the unity of the empire. When they later definitively emerged as a recognized unified entity, they were considered to be dangerous for different reasons. They were often composed of the poor and of low standing who met secretly to conduct their rituals, they were opposed to violence, and refused to serve in the Roman military while the government was beset by enemies, and therefore Roman rules sought to stifle the spread of their beliefs.
This new faith was thus not tolerated by the Romans. The government officials often found these early converts, like the Jews, not only refusing to sacrifice to the emperor as a god, as all good Roman citizens were expected to do, and refusing to acknowledge the existence of other gods, but also openly prophesying the downfall of the Roman empire. They therefore considered it to be a threat to the state religion since Christians refused to perform the Roman state religious rituals, as the Christians maintained that their God was the only God, and as a result it was not afforded the same tolerance that was extended to the Jewish religion. Unlike the Jews, the Christians wanted to convert people to Christianity. Moreover, refusing to worship at the shrines of Rome and the emperor seemed an indication of treasonable intention against the state. Thus, it initially spread underground since Christians were violently persecuted for their beliefs, but the Christian church grew nevertheless in spite of the official opposition, and the number of martyrs for the faith who reinforced how they were prepared to die for what they believed in, thus further reinforcing how this faith gave people purpose and meaning for their lives while teaching that people’s brief stay on earth was but a preparation for the far more important life to come. Christian hope also welded believers into tightly-knit communities whose members helped one another and were willing to make great sacrifices for their religion. As a result, the churches continued to grow and make new converts. Against such conviction and cohesion, the power of the state was ineffectual.
There is also evidence of how St. Peter, who Jesus of Nazareth put in charge of the Church, travelled to Rome and spent the last years of his life there before being executed. Later on, Christians started calling Peter and the bishops of Rome who followed him “popes,” from papa, or the Latin word for father. The church also began to see itself as a sort of spiritual successor to the Roman Empire with “Catholic,” or universal authority, just like the Roman emperors. While Christianity continued growing and there was the outward prosperity of the empire, it began declining during the second century of peace. The efforts of Trajan and Hadrian could not permanently protect the Empire against the barbarians. When the emperor Marcus Aurelius, took charge of the government and ruled from 161 to 180, he was called to face a very serious situation. He had to fight the Parthians, who had long threatened the eastern boundary of the Empire. Then Germanic barbarian Marcomanni in the north aiming to plunder Roman territory while possibly fleeing invading Goths to the north led a massive emigration of a confederation of Germanic tribes that broke through the Roman frontier defences and poured down into Italy in 166 with unusual intensity. The two centuries of peaceful coexistence and trade between the Roman empire and the Germanic tribes were thus ended. During the rest of his reign, Marcus Aurelius struggled against these barbarian invaders in the consequent Marcomannic wars for fourteen years, but he was unable to expel them entirely from the northern frontiers of the Empire. He finally took the very dangerous step of allowing some of them to settle within the frontier on the condition that they would defend it from other barbarian peoples.
In addition to the weakening of the defences of the northern frontier, the empire was also degenerating in many other ways. The decline of farming continued, which was partly due to the exhaustion of the soil and bad cultivation. As a result, the soil was in such poor condition that it no longer yielded good crops. Meanwhile, most of the land that should have remained under cultivation and therefore helped feed the people of Italy continued to pass into the hands of rich property holders who set up villa estates, and ruined the small farmer of Italy. The same situations took place in the Roman provinces.
Most of the small farmers gave up the struggle to keep their small holdings, as the taxes became unbearable, and would go farm the land of a wealthy villa, or great estate, owner who would receive the largest part of what the farm yielded. Meanwhile, the farmer, or colonus, and were forever bound by law to the land that had once been worked by slaves, whose numbers steadily diminished after the end of the long wars, unless they migrated to the city where the government distributed free food to the unemployed. In turn, the state supported the unemployed with money that had been raised by taxing the few remaining farmers more heavily. Many also forsook their fields and turned to the city since neglecting fertilizing the soil and long-continued cultivation exhausted the land, and it would no longer produce crops. As a result, a great deal of land became abandoned, the amount of farmland decreased, and the empire was no longer raising enough food to feed the population and food prices rose rapidly. The destruction of the small farmers had other consequences. There were fewer of the large families that had been found in the countryside, and as a result the number of marriages decreased and the population of the Empire shrank. At the same time, business in the cities also decreased. The poor country communities could no longer afford to buy goods from the city, so manufacturers were unable to dispose of their goods and had to discharge workmen. This in turn increased the number of the poor and unemployed in the city.
Meanwhile, famine and pestilence decimated the population, and manpower became increasingly scarce, while manpower and resources needed to maintain the vast territory of the empire strained the economic system. The shortage was met in part by incorporating barbarians, especially Germans, into the army, and by allowing others to settle as farmers on empty lands inside the Roman borders. Fourth century German communities turned easily to warfare to support themselves by plundering weaker ones than grow food for themselves, in addition to engaging in plundering raids across the Roman frontier. An additional benefit was to be hired as soldiers by the Romans and be supported through the resources of the Roman empire, which they saw had prosperous farmlands and flourishing towns, and could therefore share in its obvious wealth.
However, the economic system of the empire eventually caused a strain on its resources, as the economy was based on agriculture. With money being consistently invested in land, liquid capital for investment or taxation was always scarce. The empire was also running out of money at the same time. Many of the old silver and gold mines around the Mediterranean were being worked out. Wear in circulation, loss by shipwreck, private hoards, and considerable sums that went to pay for goods in India and China, or as gifts to German barbarians caused the diminishing of the supply of precious metals. The government was therefore unable to secure enough to coin the money necessary for the transaction of business, and the government never developed a system of public debt, or a policy of borrowing against future revenues, and the tax system had never been very efficient in tapping into the wealth of the aristocracy. Coinage was therefore debased to reduce the amount of silver in coins, causing inflation to soar. Whereas the coins of Augustus were pure, those of Marcus Aurelius contained twenty-five percent alloy. Two generations after Marcus Aurelius, there was only five percent of silver in a government coin.
The army was also in decline during the rule of Marcus Aurelius, as it was difficult to maintain an army without money. As it became impossible to collect taxes in money, the government was obliged to accept grain and produce as payment of taxes. The army occasionally began to be paid in grain, and on the frontiers, for lack of other pay, soldiers were given land that they could cultivate with their families. They soon lost all army discipline and became merely a feeble militia called “frontiersmen,” limitanei. The legions had also become much smaller, and they were increasingly composed of barbarians, especially Germans and the natives of the northern Balkans. The Roman citizen became a rarity in the ranks as the population fell, possibly by about one third, and it soon became necessary to allow the barbarians to fight in their own massed formations to which they were accustomed. The discipline of the legion, and the legion itself, disappeared, and with it the superior power of Rome was gone. Another serious defect in the organization of the Roman state was that there had never been a legal method established for choosing a new emperor and transferring the power from one emperor to the next, and thus maintaining the supreme authority of the state, which rested on the control of the army. Control of the army therefore became the chief source of power in the state. The spread of civilization to the provinces also made them feel that they were equals of Rome and Italy itself, and the population of Italy was largely foreign, including emperors Trajan and Hadrian who were Spanish.
The beginning of the end of the Roman empire and the earlier Pax Romana began in approximately 180, following the rule of Marcus Aurelius and his succession by his son Commodus who ruled until 192, who became emperor on the basis of inheritance, rather than on previous emperors choosing their stepsons to succeed them based on merit. The reign of Commodus marked the end of the earlier stability that the empire had experienced due to his personal flaws, including demonstrating personal hostility against perceived enemies, among demonstrating other abuses of personal power onto many innocent victims. He was known to draw up long lists of people to be murdered, and was strangled by a wrestler friend of his mistress, who saw her own name on a list. Rome began its downfall after Commodus was killed, as there began a struggle among military usurpers who would not accept a senatorial appointee as emperor without demanding special privileges for themselves, with five emperors ascending to the throne in the year following his reign. The Praetorian Guard installed Pertinax as Commodus’s immediate successor, only to then murder him less than three months later when he tried to discipline them and refused to pay them an adequate bribe. The Praetorian Guard then auctioned the imperial office to the highest bidder in 193, and installed the unpopular Didus Julianus. This stirred the provincial armies to revolt with three generals, which proclaimed emperor by the troops under their command, resulting in civil war between Roman armies.
A military leader, Septimus Severus, used his forces to became the successor in 197 in cooperation with Claudius Albinus who had competed against him to rule the empire, and agreed to head the Roman administration, while a third contender, Pescennius Niger, was killed during the civil war in 194. Severus would then wage a civil war against Albinus that ended in 197, while attempting to restore order. He systematically filled the highest posts in the government with military leaders of low origin, and managed to restore political stability for the following eighteen years. Thus, the ignorant and often foreign masses were gaining control of both the army and the government. He assumed the right to make law by his own proclamations without securing the agreement of the Senate, and also favoured the soldiers by raising their pay by increasing taxes. This meant officials in charge of tax collections, the curiales, faced impoverishment when the emperor demanded more money that they could extract from their city, since they had to compensate for the shortfall by paying funds from their personal resources. Hence, local magistracies no longer sought to be appointed to this position that had been an honour, but then became crushed down by the weight of taxation. In their place, government officials were increasingly more recruited from the army, and tax collection became little more than organised robbery with soldiers taking what they could find, and dividing booty among themselves and their higher officers as they deemed necessary.
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