Augustus<\/h2>\n
The height of Roman power coincided with the first two hundred years of the Roman Empire, a period that was remembered as the Pax Romana<\/em>: the Peace of Rome. It was possible during the period of the Roman Empire's height, from about 1 CE to 200 CE, to travel from the Atlantic coast of Spain or Morocco all the way to Mesopotamia using good roads, speaking a common language, and enjoying official protection from banditry. The Roman Empire was as rich, powerful, and glorious as any in history up to that point, but it also represented oppression and imperialism to slaves, poor commoners, and conquered peoples.<\/p>\n Octavian was unquestionably the architect of the Roman Empire. Unlike his great-uncle, Julius Caesar, Octavian eliminated all political rivals and set up a permanent hereditary emperorship. All the while, he claimed to be restoring not just peace and prosperity, but the Republic itself. Since the term Rex<\/em> (king) would have been odious to his fellow Romans, Augustus instead referred to himself as Princeps Civitatis<\/em>, meaning \u201cfirst citizen.\u201d While he used the Senate to maintain a fa\u00e7ade of republican rule, behind the scenes he was instructing senators on the actions they were to take. In this way, it wasn\u2019t Octavian\u2019s idea to remain consul for life, the Senate asked him to do it and of course he had no choice but to graciously accept. By 23 BCE, Octavian also assumed the position of tribune for life, a position that allowed unlimited power in making or vetoing legislation. All soldiers swore personal oaths of loyalty to him, and since he conquered Egypt from his former ally Mark Antony, Augustus was worshiped there as the latest pharaoh. Finally, the Senate awarded Octavian the honorific Augustus<\/em>: \u201cillustrious\u201d or \u201csemi-divine.\u201d It is by that name, Augustus Caesar, that he is best remembered.<\/p>\n Despite his obvious personal power, Augustus found it useful to maintain the fa\u00e7ade of the Republic, along with republican values like thrift, honesty, bravery, and honor. He instituted strong moralistic laws that penalized\u2014elite\u2014young men who tried to avoid marriage and he celebrated the piety and loyalty of conservative married women. Even as he converted the government from a republic to a bureaucratic tool of his own will, he insisted on traditional republican beliefs and republican culture. This no doubt reflected his own conservative tastes, but it also eased the transition from republic to autocracy for the traditional Roman elites.<\/p>\n As Augustus\u2019s powers grew, he received an altogether novel legal status, imperium majus<\/em>, that was something like access to the extraordinary powers of a dictator under the Republic. Combined with his ongoing tribuneship and direct rule over the provinces in which most of the Roman army was garrisoned at the time, Augustus\u2019s practical control of the Roman state was unchecked. As a whole, the legal categories used to explain and excuse the reality of Augustus\u2019s vast powers worked well during his administration but sometimes proved a major problem with later emperors because few were as competent as he had been. Emperors who respected Roman laws and traditions won prestige and veneration for having done so, but there was never a formal legal challenge to imperial authority. Subsequent emperors sometimes behaved as if the laws were truly irrelevant to their own conduct, and the relationship between emperor and law was never explicitly defined. Likewise, as the centuries went on and many emperors came to seize power through force, it was painfully apparent that the letter of the law was less important than the personal power of a given emperor in all too many cases.<\/p>\n Figure 7.1<\/strong> One of the more spectacular surviving statues of Augustus. Augustus was, among other things, a master of propaganda, commissioning numerous statues and busts of himself to be installed across the empire.<\/em> Credit: Augustus Caesar<\/u><\/a> by Till Niermann.<\/p>\n This extraordinary power did not prompt resistance in large part because the practical reforms Augustus introduced were effective. He transformed the Senate and equestrian class into a real civil service to manage the enormous empire. He eliminated tax farming and replaced it with taxation through salaried officials. He instituted a regular messenger service. His forces even attacked Ethiopia in retaliation for attacks on Egypt and he received ambassadors from India and Scythia (present-day Ukraine). In short, he supervised the consolidation of Roman power after the decades of civil war and struggle that preceded his takeover, and the large majority of Romans and Roman subjects alike were content with the demise of the Republic because of the improved stability Augustus's reign represented. Only one major failure marred his rule: three legions\u2014perhaps as many as 20,000 soldiers\u2014were destroyed in an ambush in the forests of Germany in 9 CE, halting any attempt to expand Roman power past the Rhine and Danube rivers. Despite that disaster, after Augustus\u2019s death the Senate voted to deify him. Like his great-uncle Julius, he was now to be worshiped as a god.<\/p>\n From 14 to 180 CE, Roman imperial rule unfolded through three distinct phases. The first was the Julio-Claudian dynasty (14\u201368 CE), which consisted of emperors related by blood or adoption to the family line of Julius Caesar\u2014with Claudius being the family name of Octavian. Following the chaos of a brief civil war in 69 CE, power passed to the Flavian dynasty (69\u201396 CE), a ruling house founded by a father and his two sons who seized control of the empire and restored political stability. After the fall of the Flavians, Rome entered the era of the so-called \u201cFive Good Emperors\u201d (96\u2013180 CE), a period marked not by hereditary succession but by the deliberate selection of capable successors, as emperors chose their heirs based on merit rather than family ties.<\/p>\n There is a simple and vexing problem with any discussion of the Roman emperors: the sources. While archaeology and the surviving written sources create a reasonably clear basis for understanding the major political events of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the biographical details are much more difficult. All of the surviving written accounts about the lives of the Julio-Claudian emperors were written many decades\u2014in some cases more than a century\u2014after their reign. In turn, the two most important biographers, Tacitus and Suetonius, detested the actions and the character of the Julio-Claudians, and thus their accounts are rife with scandalous anecdotes that may or may not have any basis in historical truth. With this understood, Tacitus is universally regarded as the more reliable, although Suetonius\u2019s The Twelve Caesars<\/em> does make for very entertaining reading. Thus, the biographical sketches below are an attempt to summarize what is known for sure, along with some notes on the scandalous assertions that may be at least partly fabricated.<\/p>\n When Augustus died in 14 CE, his stepson Tiberius (r. 14-37 CE) became the first true emperor of Rome. While it was possible that the Senate might have tried to reassert its power, there was no political will to do so. Only idealistic or embittered senators really dreamed of restoring the Republic, and a coup would have been rejected by the vast majority of Roman citizens. Under the Caesars, after all, the empire had never been more powerful or wealthy. Genuine concessions had been made to the common people, especially soldiers, and the only people who really lost out in the short term were the old elite families of patricians, who no longer had political power independent of the emperor (although they certainly retained their wealth and status).<\/p>\n Tiberius began his rule as a cautious leader who put on a show of only reluctantly following in Augustus's footsteps as the uncontested leader of Rome. He was a reasonably competent emperor for over a decade, delegating decisions to the Senate and ensuring that the empire remained secure and financially solvent. In addition, he oversaw a momentous change to the priorities of the Roman state: the Roman Empire would no longer continue on a sustained campaign of expansion as it had done ever since the early decades of the Republic half a millennium earlier. This does not appear to have been a conscious policy choice on the part of Tiberius, but instead a shift in priorities. The Senate was now staffed by land-owning elites who did not predicate their identities on warfare, and Tiberius himself saw little benefit in warring against Persia or invading Germany. It could be that he also feared that successful generals might threaten his power and at one point he ordered one to call off a war in Germany. The Roman Empire would continue to expand at times in the following centuries, but never to the degree or at the pace that it had under the Republic.<\/p>\n Eventually, Tiberius retreated to a private estate on the island of Capri off the west coast of Italy. Suetonius\u2019s biography would have it that on Capri, Tiberius indulged his penchant for bloodshed and sexual abuse, which is highly questionable\u2014what is not questionable is that Tiberius became embittered and suspicious, ordering the murders of various would-be claimants to his throne back in Rome, and sometimes ignoring affairs of state. When he died\u2014much to the relief of the Roman populace\u2014great hopes were pinned on his heir.<\/p>\n That heir was Gaius Germanicus Caesar (r. 37-41 CE), much better known as Caligula, which literally means \u201clittle boots.\u201d As a boy, Caligula moved with his father, a famous and well-liked general related by marriage to the Julio-Claudians, from army camp to army camp. As he did so he liked to dress up in miniature legionnaire combat boots; hence, he was affectionately dubbed \"Caligula\u201d or \u201cBootsie\" by the troops\u2014one notable translation of the work of Suetonius by Robert Graves translates Caligula as \"Bootikins\" instead.<\/p>\n Even if some of the stories of his personal sadism are exaggerated, there is no doubt that Caligula was a disastrous emperor. According to the biographers, Caligula quickly earned a reputation for cruelty and megalomania, enjoying executions\u2014or simple murders\u2014as forms of entertainment and spending vast sums on shows of power. Convinced of his own godhood, Caligula had the heads of statues of the gods removed and replaced with his own head. He liked to appear in public dressed as various gods or<\/em> goddesses. One of his high priests was his horse, Incitatus, whom he also supposedly appointed as a Roman consul. He staged an invasion of northern Gaul of no tactical significance which culminated in a Triumph back in Rome.<\/p>\n Much of the scandalous gossip about him, historically, is because he was unquestionably the enemy of the Senate, seeing potential traitors everywhere and inflicting waves of executions against former supporters. He used trials for treason to enrich himself after squandering the treasury on buildings and public games. He also made senators wait on him dressed as slaves and demanded that he be addressed as \u201cdominus et deus<\/em>,\u201d meaning \"master and god.\" He was finally murdered by a group of senators and guardsmen.<\/p>\n The conspirators wanted to transition Rome back to a Republic, but before they could do much, the Praetorian Guard\u2014discussed below\u2014proclaimed a new emperor. This man was Claudius (r. 41-54 CE), who would turn out to be the only truly competent emperor of the Julio-Claudian line after Augustus. Claudius had survived palace intrigues because he walked with a limp and spoke with a pronounced stutter. He was widely considered to be a simpleton, but he was actually highly intelligent. Once in power Claudius proved himself a competent and refreshingly sane emperor, ending the waves of terror Caligula had unleashed. He went on to oversee the conquest of England, first begun by Julius Caesar decades earlier. He was also a scholar, mastering the Etruscan and Punic languages and writing histories of those two civilizations\u2014the histories are now lost, unfortunately. He restored the imperial treasury, depleted by Tiberius and Caligula, and maintained the Roman borders. He also established a true bureaucracy to manage the vast empire and began the process of formally distinguishing between the personal wealth of the emperor and the official budget of the Roman state.<\/p>\n According to Roman historians, Claudius was eventually betrayed and poisoned by his wife, who sought to have her son from another marriage become emperor. That son was Nero. Nero (r. 54-68 CE) was another Julio-Claudian who acquired a terrible historical reputation. While he was fairly popular during his first few years as emperor, he eventually succumbed to a Caligula-like tendency of having elite Romans\u2014including his domineering mother\u2014killed. In 64 CE, a huge fire nearly destroyed the city, which was largely built out of wood. This led to the legend of Nero \"playing his fiddle while Rome burned.\" In fact, in the fire's aftermath Nero had shelters built for the homeless and set about rebuilding the roughly half of the city that had been destroyed, using concrete buildings and grid-based streets. That said, he did use space cleared by the fire to begin the construction of a gigantic new palace in the middle of Rome called the \"golden house,\" into which he poured state revenues.<\/p>\n Nero\u2019s terrible reputation arose from the fact that he unquestionably hounded and persecuted elite Romans using a law called the Maiestas<\/em> which made it illegal to slander the emperor. These accusations allowed him to extract huge amounts of money from senators and equestrians. He also ordered imagined rivals and former advisors to kill themselves, probably out of mere jealousy. Besides Roman elites, his other major target was the early Christian movement, whom he blamed for the fire in Rome and whom he relentlessly persecuted\u2014thousands were killed in the gladiatorial arena, ripped apart by wild animals. Thus, the two groups in the position to write Nero's history\u2014elite Romans and early Christians\u2014had every reason to hate him. In addition, Nero took great pride in being an actor and musician, two professions that were considered by Roman elites to be akin to prostitution. His artistic indulgences were thus scandalous violations of elite sensibilities. After completely losing the support of both the army and the Senate, Nero committed suicide in 68 CE.<\/p>\n Another note on the sources: what the \"bad\" emperors of the Julio-Claudian line\u2014Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero\u2014had in common was that they violated the old traditions of Romanitas<\/em>, squandering wealth and glorifying themselves in various ways, thus inspiring hostility from many elite Romans. Since it was other elite Romans\u2014albeit many years later\u2014who became their biographers, we in the present cannot help but have a skewed view of their conduct. Historians have rehabilitated much of the rule of Tiberius and\u2014to a lesser extent\u2014Nero in particular, arguing that even if they were at loggerheads with the Senate at various times and probably did unfairly prosecute at least some senators, they did a decent job of running the empire as well.<\/p>\n In the aftermath of Nero's death, a brief civil war broke out. Four generals competed for the emperorship, supported by their armies. In the end, a general named Vespasian (r. 69 \u2013 79 CE) seized power and founded a fairly short-lived dynasty consisting of himself and his two sons, known to history as the Flavians. The importance of Vespasian\u2019s takeover was that it reinforced the idea that real power in Rome was no longer that of the old power-broking families, but instead the armies. Vespasian himself had no legal claim to the throne, but his emperorship was ratified by the Senate nevertheless due to the strength of his forces. In the long run, this meant that the emperor's major concern had to be maintaining the loyalty of the armies above all else. As we will see in the centuries to come, they could, and would, openly fight to put their man on the throne in a time of crisis.<\/p>\n Vespasian was one of the great emperors of the early empire. He pulled state finances back from the terrible state they had been left in by Nero and restored the relationship between the emperor and the Roman elite. It certainly did not hurt his reputation that he was a successful general, one of the traditional sources of status among Roman leaders. He was also renowned both for his openness and his grounded outlook. Reputedly, he did not keep a guard and let people speak to him directly in public audiences. In an act of classic Romanitas<\/em>, he started work on the famous Colosseum\u2014known at the time as the Flavian Amphitheater\u2014in Rome in order to provide a grand setting for public games and performances. All of this happened in just a decade; he died of natural causes in 79 CE.<\/p>\n Figure 7.2<\/strong> The outside of the Colosseum in present-day Rome.<\/em> Credit: Colosseum<\/u><\/a> by Andreas Ribbefjord.<\/p>\n Vespasian's older son Titus (r. 79-81 CE) had been groomed to follow his father and began as a promising and competent emperor. Unfortunately, almost as soon as he took the throne Mt. Vesuvius\u2014a volcano in southern Italy\u2014erupted, followed shortly by another huge fire, as well as an epidemic in Rome. Titus struggled to aid victims of all three disasters but was then struck by fever and died in 81 CE.<\/p>\n Vespasian's second son, Domitian (r. 81-96 CE), who was not \"supposed\" to take the throne, is presented in history as a terrible ruler. It was said he created an atmosphere of terror in elite Roman circles in an effort to watch out for potential rebels, murdering senators and elites he suspected. He adopted a Caligula-like concern for glorifying himself\u2014like Caligula, he insisted that he be addressed as \u201cdominus et deus<\/em>\u201d\u2014and liked to appear before the Senate in the armor of a Roman commander returning from victory. He was moralistic about both sex and the divinity of the emperors, instituting a policy that all oaths had to be sworn to the godhood of the emperor. About the only positive undertaking that is reported about his rule was major building projects, both for palaces for himself and public works\u2014including roads and fortifications\u2014and it is also worth noting that the empire remained under a stable administration during his reign. That noted, Domitian became increasingly paranoid and violent between 89 and 96 CE, until he was finally killed by assassins in the palace. Mind you, like with the Julio-Claudian dynasty, this history was written by those who came after the demise of the Flavians, in fact by the very ones who rose to power after the death of Domitian. Like with the histories of Tacitus and Suetonius, we have to take these accounts with a healthy dose of skepticism.<\/p>\n Following the work of the great eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon, historians frequently refer to the rulers of the Roman Empire who followed the death of Domitian as the \u201cFive Good Emperors,\u201d those who successfully managed the Empire at its height. During this period that lasted almost a century, emperors appointed their own successors from the most competent members of the younger generation of Roman elites. Not least because none of them\u2014except the last, to disastrous consequences\u2014had surviving direct heirs of their own, each emperor would adopt a younger man as his son, thereby ensuring his succession. Rome prospered during this period under this relatively meritocratic system of political succession. It was under one of these emperors, Trajan, that the empire achieved its greatest territorial expanse.<\/p>\n One of the important aspects of the behavior of the \u201cgood emperors\u201d is that they fit the model of a \"philosopher-king\" first described by Plato centuries earlier. Even though monarchy had been repugnant to earlier Romans, during the period of the Republic, the good emperors tried to live and act according to traditional Romanitas<\/em>, undertaking actions not only for their own glorification but for the good of the Roman state. The borders were maintained\u2014or, as under Trajan, expanded\u2014public works and infrastructure built, and infighting among elites kept to a minimum.<\/p>\n Trajan\u2019s accomplishments deserve special mention, not only because of his success in expanding the Empire, but in how he governed it. He was a fastidious and straightforward administrator, focusing his considerable energies on the practical business of ruling. He personally responded to requests and correspondence, he instituted a program of inexpensive loans to farmers using the interest to pay for food for poor children, and he worked closely and successfully with the Senate to maintain stability and imperial solvency. The fact that he personally led the legions on major military campaigns capped his reign in the military glory expected of an emperor following the rule of the Flavians, but he was remembered at least as well for his skill as a leader in peacetime.<\/p>\n The next two emperors, Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, did not win comparable military glory, but they did defend the borders. Hadrian gave up Trajan\u2019s conquests in Mesopotamia to do so, recognizing that they were unsustainable. He also oversaw major building projects while maintaining Roman stability. Hadrian spent much of his reign touring the Roman provinces, particularly Greece. It was clear by his reign that the emperor\u2019s authority was practically limitless, with both emperors issuing imperial proclamations known as \u201crescripts\u201d while away from Rome that carried the force of law.<\/p>\n This period of successful rule eventually broke down when the practice of choosing a competent successor ended. The culprit here was the emperor Marcus Aurelius, a brilliant leader and Stoic philosopher (161-180 CE) who named his arrogant and foolish son Commodus (r. 177-192 CE) his co-emperor three years before his own death. His decision to make Commodus his heir was due to a simple fact: Aurelius was the first of the Five Good Emperors to have a biological son who survived to adulthood. However, it wasn\u2019t just this one choice that brought an end to the period of the Five Good Emperors. Though he had been a scrupulously efficient and focused political leader, storm clouds had already been gathering under Aurelius before he chose his son as his heir. When Germanic tribes made incursions into Roman territory in the north, the emperor found himself obliged to lead the military campaigns against them despite his own lack of a military background\u2014or, really, temperament. While Commodus would achieve peace in the region after his father died, as emperor, Commodus indulged his taste for debauchery and ignored affairs of state. This led to his assassination after twelve years of incompetent rule.<\/p>\n One last dynasty emerged in the aftermath of Commodus\u2019s death, that of the Severans who ruled from 192-235 CE. They faced growing threats on the Roman borders, as Germanic tribes staged repeated\u2014and often at least temporarily successful\u2014incursions to the north and a new Persian dynasty known as the Sasanians pressed against Roman territory to the east. The last Severan emperor, Severus Alexander, died in 235 CE, and as we will see in the next chapter, this ushered in a terrible period of military defeat and instability in which the following 49 years saw a succession of 22 emperors, only one of which did not die a violent death.<\/p>\n As noted above, by the year 117 CE the Empire had reached its greatest size during the reign of Trajan. It encompassed most of England in the northwest, France in the north, Germany and Romania in the northeast, all of North Africa in the south, and extended to the borders of the Persian Empire in the east. As far as the Romans were concerned beyond these borders were \u201cbarbarians\u201d of various kinds. Only the Persians were deemed to be civilized by the Romans. Trajan's successor, the emperor Hadrian, built an enormous series of fortifications to consolidate power on the frontiers. By the third century CE these were known as limes<\/em>, permanent garrisons and fortresses that were meant to serve as barriers to prevent barbarian incursions. Some of these survive to the present, including portions of Hadrian's Wall in northern England. While fleets patrolled the rivers and oceans, these garrisons controlled land access to the empire.<\/p>\n Figure 7.3<\/strong> The Empire at the height of its territorial expanse under Trajan in 117 CE, including the Latin names of its provinces.<\/em> Credit: Empire 117 CE<\/u><\/a> by Aregakn.<\/p>\n As far as the Romans were concerned, there were only two things beyond those borders: to the north and northeast, endless tracts of inhospitable land and semi-human barbarians like the Germanic tribes, and to the east, the only other civilization Rome was prepared to recognize: the Persians, ruled first by the Parthians and then the Sasanians. The Germanic tribes were just pests in the eyes of the Romans. The Persians were much more problematic. For the rest of the Imperial period, Rome and Persia periodically engaged in both raiding and full-scale warfare, with neither side proving capable of conclusively defeating the other.<\/p>\n Parthian history is difficult to establish because almost no sources survive besides Roman and Greek accounts of battles against<\/em> the Parthians. What is clear is that the Parthians\u2014who referred to themselves as the Parni\u2014deliberately built on the achievements of the earlier Achaemenid and Seleucid periods, adopting the title of king of kings, basing their empire (as of the 120s BCE) out of Ctesiphon\u2014a city near Babylon in Mesopotamia\u2014and ruling over a shifting confederation of the settled peoples of Mesopotamia and Persia and nomadic tribal confederations. Importantly, the Parthians were able to take control of major Silk Road trade routes, even receiving the first ever formal diplomatic contact with China in the West in the process, and thus had a solid economic foundation for their military and political control of the region.<\/p>\n Persia had long stood as the only adversary Rome was unable to defeat. In a stark contrast to Roman tactics, Persia relied on cavalry instead of infantry, including both heavy, armored lancers and highly mobile mounted bowmen. Persian forces refused to engage in hand-to-hand combat with Roman soldiers whenever possible and instead simply rained arrows on them from horseback using compound bows capable of penetrating Roman armor. Probably the most notorious Roman defeat to the Persians was that of the forces led by Crassus, Julius Caesar\u2019s ally in the First Triumvirate. In 53 BCE at a site known as Carrhae, the Persians slew 20,000 Roman troops and took another 10,000 prisoners. Following the defeat, Crassus entered into a parlay\u2014a negotiation meeting\u2014with a Parthian general that turned violent. Some accounts relate that the Parthians poured molten gold into Crassus\u2019 mouth to mock his extreme greed, while others simply state he was killed in the chaos. Regardless of how he died, the battle led to a grudging admiration on the part of the Romans, who were forced to acknowledge that they had met their match.<\/p>\n The closest Rome came to defeating the Persians was under Trajan when he managed to conquer Armenia and parts of Mesopotamia, but after his death Rome swiftly abandoned those territories. Even as they fought, however, Persia and Rome still traded, both in goods and ideas. While Rome adopted irrigation techniques from Persia, Persia adopted engineering techniques from Rome. Out of necessity, Rome began to add heavy cavalry units to its legions by the fourth century CE.<\/p>\n Little else is known about Persia during the Parthian period. The Roman sources would have it that the power of the ruling dynasty was limited by both court intrigue and the frequency of invasions from the steppes\u2014the usual problem for the settled dynasties of Mesopotamia and Persia going back to the very origins of civilization. Parthian storytelling was a rich oral tradition, but only fragments and mentions of their epic tales have survived, along with a number of inscribed epitaphs and memorials. Both war and trade came and went between Rome and Persia, with the Euphrates River existing as the usual boundary between the two empires and the nearby kingdom of Armenia acting as a buffer state, but which itself was dominated by one power and then the other over time. In 224 CE the last Parthian ruler was overthrown by Ardashir I, the leader of the Sasanian clan, and Persian history moved into a new phase under Sasanian rule (described in the next chapter).<\/p>\n During the height of the Roman imperial period, China was flourishing under the Han Dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE). China and Rome never established formal diplomatic ties, although the leaders of both empires knew of one another. During the entire period of Roman imperial power, only China could produce silk, which was highly coveted in Rome. Shipments of silk moved along the aptly-named Silk Road across Central Asia, directly linking via Persia\u2014which derived huge profits in the process\u2014the two most powerful empires in the world at the time.<\/p>\n In addition to land trade, a major navigational breakthrough occurred during the time of Augustus, when the Romans learned to navigate the Indian Ocean using the monsoon winds to reach western India. There, they could trade for Chinese silk at much better prices. This journey was risky, but if a Roman merchant could pull it off and return home with a cargo hold full of silk, he would earn 100 times his investment as profit. Along with spices\u2014especially pepper\u2014the trade for silk eventually drained enormous amounts of gold from Rome, something that created a serious economic liability over the hundreds of years of exchange.<\/p>\n China under the Han and Rome during the height of imperial power lend themselves to comparison. Around a quarter of the world\u2019s population lived in the Roman Empire at its height, and about 20 percent of the global population was in China at the time of the Han. Thus, at the time nearly half of the entire population of the human species was part of one empire or the other. The Han Dynasty established powerful and extremely long-lasting political precedents, most importantly an official focus on the ideas of the great philosopher Confucius (551 - 479 BCE) as guiding principles for good governance. Although there are many differences, some Confucian ideas have parallels with the Roman concept of Romanitas<\/em>, particularly in terms of the importance of selfless duty to the country and a celebration of social hierarchy.<\/p>\n Both Chinese and Roman elites saw their respective cultures as being supreme over other, lesser peoples. Foreign cultures were judged by Romans in terms of how closely they resembled, or differed from, the Roman model, and as we have seen, all non-Romans were lumped together as \u201cbarbarians.\u201d Chinese political theory held that China was the \u201cmiddle kingdom\u201d between heaven and earth, with all other states and peoples owing the Chinese emperor\u2014the \u201cson of heaven\u201d\u2014fealty. Likewise, foreign peoples were all \u201cbarbarians\u201d from the Chinese perspective. By the reign of Tacitus, neither empire was actively expansionist, but that can be explained at least in part by the fact that the Romans and the Chinese felt secure in their supremacy, surrounded as they were by undesirable lands, subservient tributary or puppet kingdoms, or nomadic groups who were\u2014from the Roman and Chinese perspective\u2014little more than a minor nuisance.<\/p>\n Naturally, there were numerous major differences between Roman and Chinese politics, beliefs, cultural practices, and social organization. With the benefit of historical hindsight, however, it is striking to reflect on the fact that both empires were genuinely preeminent in their respective world regions and both exercised supreme self-confidence. Only the vast distances that separated them prevented Rome and China from entering into what would probably have become a contentious but fascinating relationship.<\/p>\n The most threatening border for Rome was to its north, on the eastern and northern banks of the Rhine and Danube rivers. The region the Romans called Germania<\/em> was an enormous stretch of heavily forested land, which was cold, wet, and uninviting from the Roman perspective. The \u201cGermans\u201d were a hugely diverse group of tribes that were very similar in social set-up as the Celts. As with the Celts, they were a pre-literate society, and so much of what you know of them is from Roman documentation. The Romans described them as a tall, blue-eyed people with reddish-blond hair that were both good to trade with and good soldiers. They were also a very violent society that instituted a concept known as \u201cwergild\u201d \u2014or blood money\u2014to prevent on-going blood feuds. The Romans respected them for a quality that they called comitatus<\/em>\u2014a war bond that bound soldiers and leaders together by honor, fidelity, courage, and mutual respect. However, the Romans were not so keen on how they practiced law. In Rome, law was based on legislation and the results of trials, whereas the German law was based on tradition and relied heavily on determining the will of the gods. This often manifest in what was known as trial by ordeal. In this, the accused would be confronted by a dangerous task, such as grabbing on to hot metal or combat. If they survived, they would be deemed innocent. For hundreds of years there were complex relationships between various tribes and the Roman Empire in which the Romans both fought with and, increasingly, hired German tribes to serve as mercenaries. Eventually, some of the Germanic tribes were allowed to settle along the Roman borders in return for payments of tribute to Rome.<\/p>\n The Rhine and the Danube were the key dividing lines to the north of Rome, with Roman legions manning permanent fortifications there. As far as the Romans were concerned, even if they were able to, they did not want<\/em> to conquer German territory. The Romans tended to regard the Germans as being semi-human at best, incapable of understanding true civilization. As we saw above, some Romans did admire their bravery and codes of honor\u2014the same Tacitus who provided much of the information on the early emperors contrasted the supposed weakness and dissolution of his contemporary Romans with the rough virtue of the Germans. That being noted, most Romans believed that the Celts, conquered by Caesar centuries earlier, were able to learn and assimilate to Roman culture, but the Germans, supposedly, were not. Likewise, Germania<\/em> was assumed to be too cold, too wet, and too infertile to support organized farming and settlement. Thus, the role of the limes<\/em> was to hold the Germans back rather than to stage new wars of conquest. For about three hundred years, they did just that, until the borders started breaking down by the third century CE.<\/p>\n From the beginning, Rome had established control over its vast territory thanks to the strength of the citizen-soldiers of the Republic. However, as described in the last chapter, the republican military system declined after the Punic Wars as the number of free, economically independent Roman citizens capable of serving in the army diminished. By the first century, most Roman soldiers became career soldiers loyal to a specific general who promised tangible rewards rather than volunteers who served only in a given campaign and then returned home to their farms.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most important thing Augustus did besides establishing the principate itself was to reorganize the Roman legions. He created a standing professional army with regular pay and retirement benefits, permanently ending the reliance on the volunteer citizen-soldiers that had fought for Rome under the republic. Instead, during the empire, Legionaries served for twenty years and then were put on reserve for another five, although more than half died before reaching retirement age. The major benefits of service were a very large bonus paid on retirement\u2014equivalent to 13 years of pay! \u2014and land. Military colonies spread across the empire proving to new recruits that if they remained loyal, they could expect to establish a prosperous family line, if they lived that long.<\/p>\n Service in the army was grueling and intense. Roman soldiers were expected to be able to march over 20 miles in a standard day's march carrying a heavy pack. They were subject to brutal discipline, up to and including summary execution if they were judged to have been derelict in their duties. One of the worst was if a soldier fell asleep on guard duty which was punishable by being beaten to death by one's fellow soldiers. Roman soldiers were held to the highest standards of unit cohesion, and their combat drills meant they were constantly ready for battle.<\/p>\n Starting in the Augustan period, the essential division in the Roman military was the legion<\/em>, a self-sufficient army unto itself that could be combined with other legions to form a full-scale invasion force. During the Augustan period, each legion consisted of 5,400 infantry and 120 cavalry, along with hundreds of specialists such as engineers, arrow-makers, and blacksmiths who allowed the legion to operate independently while traveling. The legions were subdivided into cohorts of 480 men, each of which was led by a centurion<\/em>, veterans who had risen through the ranks into leadership roles. The legions were designed to be flexible, adaptable, and \u201cstandardized\u201d: each legion was comparable in its organization, down to the placement of the tents in the camps built at the end of every day while the legion was on the march.<\/p>\n In turn, each legion was led by a legionary legate<\/em>, usually a powerful noble appointed by the imperial government or the emperor himself. These legates were often politicians rather than soldiers, meaning that the key figures in actual battle were the centurions, each of whom had earned his position through exemplary service. Perhaps most important of all was the lead centurion, the First Spear, who dictated tactics on the field.<\/p>\n Figure 7.4<\/strong> Wall carvings of a Roman legion in battle, with the characteristic large rectangular shields. A regular legionnaire would typically fight in formation using a short sword after throwing javelins while closing with the enemy.<\/em> Credit: Roman Legion<\/u><\/a> by Ursus.<\/p>\n The legions were made up of Roman citizens, but not all members of the Roman military were citizens. Instead, as numerous as the legions were auxiliaries<\/em>: Roman subjects\u2014e.g. Celts, North Africans, Syrians, etc.\u2014who served the empire. The auxiliaries were divided into cohorts of infantry and alae<\/em> \u2014\"wings\"\u2014of cavalry. In comparison to the infantry-focused Roman legions, the auxiliaries tended to vary their arms and so could be slingers and archers as well as foot soldiers and cavalry. They tended to serve as scouts and support for the legions as well as engaging in combat in their own right. As of 23 CE they numbered about 150,000 men, which was the same as the legions at the time. The emperor Claudius started the practice of rewarding 25 years of service with citizenship and by the early second century all auxiliaries gained citizenship on discharge.<\/p>\n A key legion that stood apart from the rest of the military was the Praetorian Guard<\/em>, whose major job was defending the emperor himself, followed in priority by the defense of Italy and the city of Rome. The Praetorian Guard started as nine cohorts of 480 men, but later each cohort was grown to 1,000 men. Recruited from the ranks of existing legions, the terms of service in the Praetorian Guard were very attractive: 16 years instead of 25 and pay that was significantly higher. This was a necessity: emperors starting with Claudius knew that they were vulnerable to the Praetorians and needed to keep them happy and loyal.<\/p>\n Not only did the army expand and defend the borders, but it was also important in integrating provincial subjects into Roman culture. A soldier recruited from the provinces had to learn Latin, at least well enough to take orders and respond to them. Auxiliaries served with men from all over the empire, not just their own home regions, and what each soldier had in common was service to Rome. Commanding officers were often from the Latini heartland, forming a direct link to the Roman center. Military families were a reality everywhere, with sons often becoming soldiers after their fathers. Thus, the experience of serving in the legions or the auxiliaries tended to promote a shared sense of Roman identity, even when soldiers were drawn from areas that had been conquered by Rome in the recent past.<\/p>\n In the provinces, there was a pattern that took place over a few generations. After being conquered by the Romans, there were often resistance movements and rebellions. Those were put down with overwhelming and brutal force, often worse than that of the initial invasion. Eventually, local elites were integrated in the governor's office and ambitious people made sure their sons learned Latin. Locals started joining the army and, if lucky, returned eventually with money and land to show for it. Roman amenities like aqueducts and baths were built and roads linked the province with the rest of the empire. In short, assimilation happened. A few generations after Roman conquest, many residents in a given province\u2014especially local elites\u2014would identify with Roman civilization. Regular people in the countryside, meanwhile, would at least be obliged to tolerate Roman rule even if they did not embrace it.<\/p>\n In this era, Rome stood as a showcase of imperial wealth, marked by monumental architecture, lavish public works, and conspicuous displays of power. The city of Rome itself boasted eleven aqueducts, enormous structures that brought fresh water into the city from miles away. The houses of the rich had indoor plumbing with drains that led to public sewers. There were numerous libraries and temples, along with public sites for recreation, including public baths, racetracks, and the Colosseum which was used primarily for displays of lethal gladiatorial combat.<\/p>\n We should note that, while the Romans were not known for producing scientists, they are known for their architects and engineers. They mastered the art of building arches and domes to hold up ceilings without interior supports and using only gravity, they could transport water dozens of miles, not just in Rome but in other major cities across the Empire. To accomplish all of this, the Romans used concrete extensively. Many Roman structures have stood the test of time. Indeed, Roman roads were so well built that some survive to the present, now used by cars rather than the horse-drawn carts they were originally built for.<\/p>\n To reflect their need for uniformity and efficiency, each city built by the Romans in conquered territory was laid out according to careful plans, with streets built in grids and centered on a public forum with public buildings. One of the reasons that the Romans were so effective in assimilating conquered peoples into Roman society was that they built a great deal of infrastructure. Due to this, being conquered by Rome seemed less like a burden when an aqueduct, public baths, and street system appeared within a generation of the Roman conquest\u2014the relative cultural and religious tolerance of Roman culture was also key. All of these cities were linked by the 40,000 miles of roads that stretched across the empire. The primary purpose of these administrative capitals was extracting taxes and other wealth from the local areas and funneling them back to Rome, but they also served as genuine cultural centers. Likewise, even though the roads were often built with troop movement in mind, people everywhere could take advantage of them for trade.<\/p>\n The empire as a whole enjoyed levels of commercial and agricultural productivity not seen again until the seventeenth century CE. Specialized craftsmen made high-quality goods to be sold on an empire-wide market, with better-off citizens enjoying access to quality tools, dishware, linens, and other goods, both luxury and practical, much of which had been manufactured hundreds of miles away. While the long-term economic pattern was that the wealthier parts of society tended to become even richer at the expense of the common people, there was still a substantial middle class that enjoyed a relatively high standard of living.<\/p>\n This all being said, there were vast social distances that separated elites and commoners. The rich lived in a state of luxury that probably would not be equaled until the Renaissance, but the majority of Romans lived in squalid conditions. Even in the city of Rome itself, most of the citizens lived in squalor, packed into apartment buildings many stories high, made out of flammable wood and looming over open sewers.<\/p>\n Most people in the empire were, of course, poor farmers and only a minority of the imperial population lived in cities. Peasants sometimes joined the army, but most were simply poor folk struggling to get by. The peasant class wasn\u2019t homogenous; most were seasonal laborers or rented from wealthy landowners. Even those that owned farms were perpetually threatened by the predatory rich. Over the centuries, poor farmers found it more and more difficult to hold on to their land, both because they could not compete with the enormous plantations worked by enslaved laborers and because of outright extortion. There are numerous accounts of rich landowners simply forcing small farmers off of land and seizing it. The peasants could not afford to battle the rich in court, and the rich had few scruples about hiring thugs to terrify the peasants into submission. Once in a great while, a poorer Roman citizen could petition an emperor personally for redress and succeed, as could the occasional provincial to a governor, but the immense majority of the time the poor\u2014citizen and non-citizen alike\u2014were simply at the mercy of elite landowners.<\/p>\n One percent of the population of the empire were members of the aristocracy, those men who were allowed to participate as officials in the imperial government and their families. Imperial Rome was a timocracy, where access to political power was explicitly linked to wealth, a system first introduced by Augustus himself. To serve in the imperial senate required an annual income of 1,000,000 sesterces\u2014the basic coin of the empire. To serve on the governing council of a small city or town required an annual income of 100,000 sesterces. Meanwhile, a typical soldier earned about 1,200 a year, and poor farmers much less. Land ownership was by far the major determinant of wealth, and with the prevalence of slavery, economies of scale dictated that the more land a given family controlled, the more wealth they could generate.<\/p>\n The overall pattern in the Roman Imperial period is that the wealthy were highly successful in becoming richer from generation to generation, at the expense of the rest of Roman society. Between 1 and 400 CE, the wealth of elite landowners multiplied roughly eightfold with almost no new wealth coming into the Roman economy during that period. A member of the equestrian class in the Empire might have about 17,000 times the annual income of a poor laborer. Thus, as a whole, social mobility was so limited as to be almost nonexistent. Roman elites kept taxes on their own property low, but the provinces were often ruthlessly exploited and overall tax levels were high. The immense majority of Roman citizens and subjects were born into the social class they would stay in for their entire lives regardless of their own intelligence and competence.<\/p>\n Still, while they might prey on poor farmers, elite Romans were well aware of the threat posed by destitute city-dwellers. Thus, one striking characteristic of the Imperial period was \"bread and circus government.\" Building on a precedent originally established by the Gracchi during the Republic, the imperial state distributed free grain\u2014and, later, wine and olive oil\u2014to the male citizens of the city of Rome. Eventually, other Roman cities adopted the practice as well. In addition, public games and theater performances were free, subsidized by the state or by elites showing off their wealth. Though the modern mind might automatically think of gladiatorial games, the most popular were actually circuses: horse races around a track. Thus, a Roman citizen in one of the large cities could enjoy free bread\u2014although it was not enough to sustain an entire family, necessitating at least some source of supplemental income\u2014and free entertainment. Free bread or not, the average life expectancy in Roman cities was 45 years for men and 34 for women, the latter because of the horrible conditions of bearing children.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, fully 40 percent of the population of the Italian Peninsula were enslaved individuals when Augustus took power. While many were war captives, children born to enslaved women were automatically enslaved as well. Though some were engaged in domestic labor, most were part of the massive labor force on huge plantations and in mines. The conditions of life for enslaved people was often atrocious, and strict oversight and use of violent discipline ensured that no revolt ever succeeded, despite the best efforts of leaders of revolts, like Spartacus in the first century BCE. Relatively large numbers of enslaved people did earn their freedom, and freedmen as a class these freedmen tended to be innovative commercial entrepreneurs, but many had little hope of freedom. Slavery declined by about 200 CE because supplies started drying up and prices rose. After all, without the constant expansion of the empire, the conditions for enslavement were not present. By that time, however, the legal and social conditions of poor farmers had degenerated to the point that they were essentially serfs, unfree rural laborers, and so the system of labor exploitation continued.<\/p>\n For the republican period and the first few hundred years of the Empire, Roman jurisprudence was split in the provinces. Provincial people were accountable to their own legal systems so long as they were loyal to Rome and paid their taxes on schedule. The most famous historical example of the overlapping legal systems of the Empire was the biblical trial of Jesus before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. Pilate tried to hand the case off to the local Jewish puppet king, Herod, who in turn refused it and handed Jesus back over to Pilate. In the end, Jesus was executed by the Roman government for inciting rebellion, using the traditional Roman punishment of crucifixion.<\/p>\n Roman citizens could always appeal to Roman law if they wanted to, even if they lived in a province far from Rome. There were many benefits, not least exemption from the local laws that non-citizens were obliged to follow, and wealthy citizens were exempt from the more horrible forms of punishment and execution as well\u2014such as crucifixion. This changed dramatically in 212 CE when the emperor Caracalla extended citizenship to all free men and women to make it easier to collect taxes. This was an important event because it extended Roman law to almost everyone in the empire.<\/p>\n Some of the concepts and practices of Roman law outlived the empire itself. Rome initiated the tradition of using precedent to shape legal decisions, as well as the idea that there is a spirit to laws that is sometimes more important than a literal interpretation. The Romans were the first to codify the idea that someone accused of a crime was innocent until proven guilty. This was a totally radical idea in the area of justice, which in the rest of the ancient world normally held the accused guilty unless guilt could be conclusively disproved.<\/p>\n Much of Roman law still seems grossly unfair from a contemporary perspective. In particular, laws came to establish a formal divide between the rich and the poor, even in the case of citizens. The rich were protected from torture and painful execution, while the poor were subject to both. The enslaved were held in such a subservient position by the law that the testimony of one was only allowed in court cases if it had been obtained through torture. Over everything else, the decrees of the emperor were the fundamental basis of law itself. They could not be appealed or contested in the name of some kind of imagined higher authority or written constitution. The emperor did not just enforce the law; he was<\/em> the law.<\/p>\n For the first two centuries of its existence, Rome was overwhelmingly powerful, and its political institutions were strong enough to survive even prolonged periods of incompetent rule. Trouble was afoot on Rome's borders, however, as Germanic groups became more populous and better organized, and as the meritocratic system of the \u201cFive Good Emperors\u201d gave way to infighting, assassination, and civil war. At the same time, what began as a Jewish reform movement born in the Roman territory of Palestine was making significant inroads, especially in the eastern half of the Empire. This movement would come to be known as Christianity.<\/p>","rendered":" When Octavian succeeded in defeating Marc Antony, he removed the last obstacle to his own control of Rome’s vast territories. While paying lip service to the idea that the Republic still survived, he in fact replaced the republican system with one in which a single sovereign ruled over the Roman state. In doing so he founded the Roman Empire\u2014though he never called it such\u2014a political entity that would survive for almost five centuries in the west and over a thousand years in the east.<\/p>\n The system built by Octavian was called the Principate<\/em>\u2014rule by the \u201cFirst.\u201d Likewise, as we saw in the previous chapter, although \u201cCaesar\u201d had originally simply been the family name of Julius Caesar\u2019s line, \u201cCaesar\u201d would come to be synonymous with the emperor himself by the end of the first century CE. These Roman terms would last into the twentieth century CE as the imperial titles of the rulers of both Russia and Germany\u2014\u201cTsar\u201d and \u201cKaiser\u201d\u2014mean \u201cCaesar.\u201d In turn, the English word \u201cemperor\u201d derives from imperator<\/em>, the title of a victorious Roman general in the field, which was adopted as yet another honorific by the Roman emperors. The English word \u201cprince\u201d is another Romanism, from Princeps Civitatis<\/em>, \u201cFirst Citizen,\u201d the term that Augustus invented for himself. For the sake of clarity, this chapter will use the anglicized term \u201cemperor\u201d to refer to all of the leaders of the Roman imperial system.<\/p>\n The height of Roman power coincided with the first two hundred years of the Roman Empire, a period that was remembered as the Pax Romana<\/em>: the Peace of Rome. It was possible during the period of the Roman Empire’s height, from about 1 CE to 200 CE, to travel from the Atlantic coast of Spain or Morocco all the way to Mesopotamia using good roads, speaking a common language, and enjoying official protection from banditry. The Roman Empire was as rich, powerful, and glorious as any in history up to that point, but it also represented oppression and imperialism to slaves, poor commoners, and conquered peoples.<\/p>\n Octavian was unquestionably the architect of the Roman Empire. Unlike his great-uncle, Julius Caesar, Octavian eliminated all political rivals and set up a permanent hereditary emperorship. All the while, he claimed to be restoring not just peace and prosperity, but the Republic itself. Since the term Rex<\/em> (king) would have been odious to his fellow Romans, Augustus instead referred to himself as Princeps Civitatis<\/em>, meaning \u201cfirst citizen.\u201d While he used the Senate to maintain a fa\u00e7ade of republican rule, behind the scenes he was instructing senators on the actions they were to take. In this way, it wasn\u2019t Octavian\u2019s idea to remain consul for life, the Senate asked him to do it and of course he had no choice but to graciously accept. By 23 BCE, Octavian also assumed the position of tribune for life, a position that allowed unlimited power in making or vetoing legislation. All soldiers swore personal oaths of loyalty to him, and since he conquered Egypt from his former ally Mark Antony, Augustus was worshiped there as the latest pharaoh. Finally, the Senate awarded Octavian the honorific Augustus<\/em>: \u201cillustrious\u201d or \u201csemi-divine.\u201d It is by that name, Augustus Caesar, that he is best remembered.<\/p>\n Despite his obvious personal power, Augustus found it useful to maintain the fa\u00e7ade of the Republic, along with republican values like thrift, honesty, bravery, and honor. He instituted strong moralistic laws that penalized\u2014elite\u2014young men who tried to avoid marriage and he celebrated the piety and loyalty of conservative married women. Even as he converted the government from a republic to a bureaucratic tool of his own will, he insisted on traditional republican beliefs and republican culture. This no doubt reflected his own conservative tastes, but it also eased the transition from republic to autocracy for the traditional Roman elites.<\/p>\n As Augustus\u2019s powers grew, he received an altogether novel legal status, imperium majus<\/em>, that was something like access to the extraordinary powers of a dictator under the Republic. Combined with his ongoing tribuneship and direct rule over the provinces in which most of the Roman army was garrisoned at the time, Augustus\u2019s practical control of the Roman state was unchecked. As a whole, the legal categories used to explain and excuse the reality of Augustus\u2019s vast powers worked well during his administration but sometimes proved a major problem with later emperors because few were as competent as he had been. Emperors who respected Roman laws and traditions won prestige and veneration for having done so, but there was never a formal legal challenge to imperial authority. Subsequent emperors sometimes behaved as if the laws were truly irrelevant to their own conduct, and the relationship between emperor and law was never explicitly defined. Likewise, as the centuries went on and many emperors came to seize power through force, it was painfully apparent that the letter of the law was less important than the personal power of a given emperor in all too many cases.<\/p>\n Figure 7.1<\/strong> One of the more spectacular surviving statues of Augustus. Augustus was, among other things, a master of propaganda, commissioning numerous statues and busts of himself to be installed across the empire.<\/em> Credit: Augustus Caesar<\/u><\/a> by Till Niermann.<\/p>\n This extraordinary power did not prompt resistance in large part because the practical reforms Augustus introduced were effective. He transformed the Senate and equestrian class into a real civil service to manage the enormous empire. He eliminated tax farming and replaced it with taxation through salaried officials. He instituted a regular messenger service. His forces even attacked Ethiopia in retaliation for attacks on Egypt and he received ambassadors from India and Scythia (present-day Ukraine). In short, he supervised the consolidation of Roman power after the decades of civil war and struggle that preceded his takeover, and the large majority of Romans and Roman subjects alike were content with the demise of the Republic because of the improved stability Augustus’s reign represented. Only one major failure marred his rule: three legions\u2014perhaps as many as 20,000 soldiers\u2014were destroyed in an ambush in the forests of Germany in 9 CE, halting any attempt to expand Roman power past the Rhine and Danube rivers. Despite that disaster, after Augustus\u2019s death the Senate voted to deify him. Like his great-uncle Julius, he was now to be worshiped as a god.<\/p>\n From 14 to 180 CE, Roman imperial rule unfolded through three distinct phases. The first was the Julio-Claudian dynasty (14\u201368 CE), which consisted of emperors related by blood or adoption to the family line of Julius Caesar\u2014with Claudius being the family name of Octavian. Following the chaos of a brief civil war in 69 CE, power passed to the Flavian dynasty (69\u201396 CE), a ruling house founded by a father and his two sons who seized control of the empire and restored political stability. After the fall of the Flavians, Rome entered the era of the so-called \u201cFive Good Emperors\u201d (96\u2013180 CE), a period marked not by hereditary succession but by the deliberate selection of capable successors, as emperors chose their heirs based on merit rather than family ties.<\/p>\n There is a simple and vexing problem with any discussion of the Roman emperors: the sources. While archaeology and the surviving written sources create a reasonably clear basis for understanding the major political events of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the biographical details are much more difficult. All of the surviving written accounts about the lives of the Julio-Claudian emperors were written many decades\u2014in some cases more than a century\u2014after their reign. In turn, the two most important biographers, Tacitus and Suetonius, detested the actions and the character of the Julio-Claudians, and thus their accounts are rife with scandalous anecdotes that may or may not have any basis in historical truth. With this understood, Tacitus is universally regarded as the more reliable, although Suetonius\u2019s The Twelve Caesars<\/em> does make for very entertaining reading. Thus, the biographical sketches below are an attempt to summarize what is known for sure, along with some notes on the scandalous assertions that may be at least partly fabricated.<\/p>\n When Augustus died in 14 CE, his stepson Tiberius (r. 14-37 CE) became the first true emperor of Rome. While it was possible that the Senate might have tried to reassert its power, there was no political will to do so. Only idealistic or embittered senators really dreamed of restoring the Republic, and a coup would have been rejected by the vast majority of Roman citizens. Under the Caesars, after all, the empire had never been more powerful or wealthy. Genuine concessions had been made to the common people, especially soldiers, and the only people who really lost out in the short term were the old elite families of patricians, who no longer had political power independent of the emperor (although they certainly retained their wealth and status).<\/p>\n Tiberius began his rule as a cautious leader who put on a show of only reluctantly following in Augustus’s footsteps as the uncontested leader of Rome. He was a reasonably competent emperor for over a decade, delegating decisions to the Senate and ensuring that the empire remained secure and financially solvent. In addition, he oversaw a momentous change to the priorities of the Roman state: the Roman Empire would no longer continue on a sustained campaign of expansion as it had done ever since the early decades of the Republic half a millennium earlier. This does not appear to have been a conscious policy choice on the part of Tiberius, but instead a shift in priorities. The Senate was now staffed by land-owning elites who did not predicate their identities on warfare, and Tiberius himself saw little benefit in warring against Persia or invading Germany. It could be that he also feared that successful generals might threaten his power and at one point he ordered one to call off a war in Germany. The Roman Empire would continue to expand at times in the following centuries, but never to the degree or at the pace that it had under the Republic.<\/p>\n Eventually, Tiberius retreated to a private estate on the island of Capri off the west coast of Italy. Suetonius\u2019s biography would have it that on Capri, Tiberius indulged his penchant for bloodshed and sexual abuse, which is highly questionable\u2014what is not questionable is that Tiberius became embittered and suspicious, ordering the murders of various would-be claimants to his throne back in Rome, and sometimes ignoring affairs of state. When he died\u2014much to the relief of the Roman populace\u2014great hopes were pinned on his heir.<\/p>\n That heir was Gaius Germanicus Caesar (r. 37-41 CE), much better known as Caligula, which literally means \u201clittle boots.\u201d As a boy, Caligula moved with his father, a famous and well-liked general related by marriage to the Julio-Claudians, from army camp to army camp. As he did so he liked to dress up in miniature legionnaire combat boots; hence, he was affectionately dubbed “Caligula\u201d or \u201cBootsie” by the troops\u2014one notable translation of the work of Suetonius by Robert Graves translates Caligula as “Bootikins” instead.<\/p>\n Even if some of the stories of his personal sadism are exaggerated, there is no doubt that Caligula was a disastrous emperor. According to the biographers, Caligula quickly earned a reputation for cruelty and megalomania, enjoying executions\u2014or simple murders\u2014as forms of entertainment and spending vast sums on shows of power. Convinced of his own godhood, Caligula had the heads of statues of the gods removed and replaced with his own head. He liked to appear in public dressed as various gods or<\/em> goddesses. One of his high priests was his horse, Incitatus, whom he also supposedly appointed as a Roman consul. He staged an invasion of northern Gaul of no tactical significance which culminated in a Triumph back in Rome.<\/p>\n Much of the scandalous gossip about him, historically, is because he was unquestionably the enemy of the Senate, seeing potential traitors everywhere and inflicting waves of executions against former supporters. He used trials for treason to enrich himself after squandering the treasury on buildings and public games. He also made senators wait on him dressed as slaves and demanded that he be addressed as \u201cdominus et deus<\/em>,\u201d meaning “master and god.” He was finally murdered by a group of senators and guardsmen.<\/p>\n The conspirators wanted to transition Rome back to a Republic, but before they could do much, the Praetorian Guard\u2014discussed below\u2014proclaimed a new emperor. This man was Claudius (r. 41-54 CE), who would turn out to be the only truly competent emperor of the Julio-Claudian line after Augustus. Claudius had survived palace intrigues because he walked with a limp and spoke with a pronounced stutter. He was widely considered to be a simpleton, but he was actually highly intelligent. Once in power Claudius proved himself a competent and refreshingly sane emperor, ending the waves of terror Caligula had unleashed. He went on to oversee the conquest of England, first begun by Julius Caesar decades earlier. He was also a scholar, mastering the Etruscan and Punic languages and writing histories of those two civilizations\u2014the histories are now lost, unfortunately. He restored the imperial treasury, depleted by Tiberius and Caligula, and maintained the Roman borders. He also established a true bureaucracy to manage the vast empire and began the process of formally distinguishing between the personal wealth of the emperor and the official budget of the Roman state.<\/p>\n According to Roman historians, Claudius was eventually betrayed and poisoned by his wife, who sought to have her son from another marriage become emperor. That son was Nero. Nero (r. 54-68 CE) was another Julio-Claudian who acquired a terrible historical reputation. While he was fairly popular during his first few years as emperor, he eventually succumbed to a Caligula-like tendency of having elite Romans\u2014including his domineering mother\u2014killed. In 64 CE, a huge fire nearly destroyed the city, which was largely built out of wood. This led to the legend of Nero “playing his fiddle while Rome burned.” In fact, in the fire’s aftermath Nero had shelters built for the homeless and set about rebuilding the roughly half of the city that had been destroyed, using concrete buildings and grid-based streets. That said, he did use space cleared by the fire to begin the construction of a gigantic new palace in the middle of Rome called the “golden house,” into which he poured state revenues.<\/p>\n Nero\u2019s terrible reputation arose from the fact that he unquestionably hounded and persecuted elite Romans using a law called the Maiestas<\/em> which made it illegal to slander the emperor. These accusations allowed him to extract huge amounts of money from senators and equestrians. He also ordered imagined rivals and former advisors to kill themselves, probably out of mere jealousy. Besides Roman elites, his other major target was the early Christian movement, whom he blamed for the fire in Rome and whom he relentlessly persecuted\u2014thousands were killed in the gladiatorial arena, ripped apart by wild animals. Thus, the two groups in the position to write Nero’s history\u2014elite Romans and early Christians\u2014had every reason to hate him. In addition, Nero took great pride in being an actor and musician, two professions that were considered by Roman elites to be akin to prostitution. His artistic indulgences were thus scandalous violations of elite sensibilities. After completely losing the support of both the army and the Senate, Nero committed suicide in 68 CE.<\/p>\n Another note on the sources: what the “bad” emperors of the Julio-Claudian line\u2014Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero\u2014had in common was that they violated the old traditions of Romanitas<\/em>, squandering wealth and glorifying themselves in various ways, thus inspiring hostility from many elite Romans. Since it was other elite Romans\u2014albeit many years later\u2014who became their biographers, we in the present cannot help but have a skewed view of their conduct. Historians have rehabilitated much of the rule of Tiberius and\u2014to a lesser extent\u2014Nero in particular, arguing that even if they were at loggerheads with the Senate at various times and probably did unfairly prosecute at least some senators, they did a decent job of running the empire as well.<\/p>\n In the aftermath of Nero’s death, a brief civil war broke out. Four generals competed for the emperorship, supported by their armies. In the end, a general named Vespasian (r. 69 \u2013 79 CE) seized power and founded a fairly short-lived dynasty consisting of himself and his two sons, known to history as the Flavians. The importance of Vespasian\u2019s takeover was that it reinforced the idea that real power in Rome was no longer that of the old power-broking families, but instead the armies. Vespasian himself had no legal claim to the throne, but his emperorship was ratified by the Senate nevertheless due to the strength of his forces. In the long run, this meant that the emperor’s major concern had to be maintaining the loyalty of the armies above all else. As we will see in the centuries to come, they could, and would, openly fight to put their man on the throne in a time of crisis.<\/p>\n Vespasian was one of the great emperors of the early empire. He pulled state finances back from the terrible state they had been left in by Nero and restored the relationship between the emperor and the Roman elite. It certainly did not hurt his reputation that he was a successful general, one of the traditional sources of status among Roman leaders. He was also renowned both for his openness and his grounded outlook. Reputedly, he did not keep a guard and let people speak to him directly in public audiences. In an act of classic Romanitas<\/em>, he started work on the famous Colosseum\u2014known at the time as the Flavian Amphitheater\u2014in Rome in order to provide a grand setting for public games and performances. All of this happened in just a decade; he died of natural causes in 79 CE.<\/p>\n Figure 7.2<\/strong> The outside of the Colosseum in present-day Rome.<\/em> Credit: Colosseum<\/u><\/a> by Andreas Ribbefjord.<\/p>\n Vespasian’s older son Titus (r. 79-81 CE) had been groomed to follow his father and began as a promising and competent emperor. Unfortunately, almost as soon as he took the throne Mt. Vesuvius\u2014a volcano in southern Italy\u2014erupted, followed shortly by another huge fire, as well as an epidemic in Rome. Titus struggled to aid victims of all three disasters but was then struck by fever and died in 81 CE.<\/p>\n Vespasian’s second son, Domitian (r. 81-96 CE), who was not “supposed” to take the throne, is presented in history as a terrible ruler. It was said he created an atmosphere of terror in elite Roman circles in an effort to watch out for potential rebels, murdering senators and elites he suspected. He adopted a Caligula-like concern for glorifying himself\u2014like Caligula, he insisted that he be addressed as \u201cdominus et deus<\/em>\u201d\u2014and liked to appear before the Senate in the armor of a Roman commander returning from victory. He was moralistic about both sex and the divinity of the emperors, instituting a policy that all oaths had to be sworn to the godhood of the emperor. About the only positive undertaking that is reported about his rule was major building projects, both for palaces for himself and public works\u2014including roads and fortifications\u2014and it is also worth noting that the empire remained under a stable administration during his reign. That noted, Domitian became increasingly paranoid and violent between 89 and 96 CE, until he was finally killed by assassins in the palace. Mind you, like with the Julio-Claudian dynasty, this history was written by those who came after the demise of the Flavians, in fact by the very ones who rose to power after the death of Domitian. Like with the histories of Tacitus and Suetonius, we have to take these accounts with a healthy dose of skepticism.<\/p>\n Following the work of the great eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon, historians frequently refer to the rulers of the Roman Empire who followed the death of Domitian as the \u201cFive Good Emperors,\u201d those who successfully managed the Empire at its height. During this period that lasted almost a century, emperors appointed their own successors from the most competent members of the younger generation of Roman elites. Not least because none of them\u2014except the last, to disastrous consequences\u2014had surviving direct heirs of their own, each emperor would adopt a younger man as his son, thereby ensuring his succession. Rome prospered during this period under this relatively meritocratic system of political succession. It was under one of these emperors, Trajan, that the empire achieved its greatest territorial expanse.<\/p>\n One of the important aspects of the behavior of the \u201cgood emperors\u201d is that they fit the model of a “philosopher-king” first described by Plato centuries earlier. Even though monarchy had been repugnant to earlier Romans, during the period of the Republic, the good emperors tried to live and act according to traditional Romanitas<\/em>, undertaking actions not only for their own glorification but for the good of the Roman state. The borders were maintained\u2014or, as under Trajan, expanded\u2014public works and infrastructure built, and infighting among elites kept to a minimum.<\/p>\n Trajan\u2019s accomplishments deserve special mention, not only because of his success in expanding the Empire, but in how he governed it. He was a fastidious and straightforward administrator, focusing his considerable energies on the practical business of ruling. He personally responded to requests and correspondence, he instituted a program of inexpensive loans to farmers using the interest to pay for food for poor children, and he worked closely and successfully with the Senate to maintain stability and imperial solvency. The fact that he personally led the legions on major military campaigns capped his reign in the military glory expected of an emperor following the rule of the Flavians, but he was remembered at least as well for his skill as a leader in peacetime.<\/p>\n The next two emperors, Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, did not win comparable military glory, but they did defend the borders. Hadrian gave up Trajan\u2019s conquests in Mesopotamia to do so, recognizing that they were unsustainable. He also oversaw major building projects while maintaining Roman stability. Hadrian spent much of his reign touring the Roman provinces, particularly Greece. It was clear by his reign that the emperor\u2019s authority was practically limitless, with both emperors issuing imperial proclamations known as \u201crescripts\u201d while away from Rome that carried the force of law.<\/p>\n This period of successful rule eventually broke down when the practice of choosing a competent successor ended. The culprit here was the emperor Marcus Aurelius, a brilliant leader and Stoic philosopher (161-180 CE) who named his arrogant and foolish son Commodus (r. 177-192 CE) his co-emperor three years before his own death. His decision to make Commodus his heir was due to a simple fact: Aurelius was the first of the Five Good Emperors to have a biological son who survived to adulthood. However, it wasn\u2019t just this one choice that brought an end to the period of the Five Good Emperors. Though he had been a scrupulously efficient and focused political leader, storm clouds had already been gathering under Aurelius before he chose his son as his heir. When Germanic tribes made incursions into Roman territory in the north, the emperor found himself obliged to lead the military campaigns against them despite his own lack of a military background\u2014or, really, temperament. While Commodus would achieve peace in the region after his father died, as emperor, Commodus indulged his taste for debauchery and ignored affairs of state. This led to his assassination after twelve years of incompetent rule.<\/p>\n One last dynasty emerged in the aftermath of Commodus\u2019s death, that of the Severans who ruled from 192-235 CE. They faced growing threats on the Roman borders, as Germanic tribes staged repeated\u2014and often at least temporarily successful\u2014incursions to the north and a new Persian dynasty known as the Sasanians pressed against Roman territory to the east. The last Severan emperor, Severus Alexander, died in 235 CE, and as we will see in the next chapter, this ushered in a terrible period of military defeat and instability in which the following 49 years saw a succession of 22 emperors, only one of which did not die a violent death.<\/p>\n![\"Standing](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/70\/2026\/05\/image38.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe Imperial Dynasties<\/h2>\n
The Julio-Claudian Dynasty<\/h3>\n
The Flavian Dynasty<\/h3>\n
![\"Picture](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Statue-Augustus.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe \"Five Good Emperors\" and the Severans<\/h3>\n
Beyond The Empire<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\nPersia Under the Parthians<\/h3>\n
China <\/h3>\n
Germania<\/h3>\n
The Army and Assimilation<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\nRoman Society<\/h2>\n
Social Classes<\/h3>\n
Law<\/h3>\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n
Augustus<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\nThe Imperial Dynasties<\/h2>\n
The Julio-Claudian Dynasty<\/h3>\n
The Flavian Dynasty<\/h3>\n
<\/p>\nThe “Five Good Emperors” and the Severans<\/h3>\n
Beyond The Empire<\/h2>\n
![Roman Legion<\/u><\/a> by Ursus.<\/p>\nThe legions were made up of Roman citizens, but not all members of the Roman military were citizens. Instead, as numerous as the legions were auxiliaries<\/em>: Roman subjects\u2014e.g. Celts, North Africans, Syrians, etc.\u2014who served the empire. The auxiliaries were divided into cohorts of infantry and alae<\/em> \u2014”wings”\u2014of cavalry. In comparison to the infantry-focused Roman legions, the auxiliaries tended to vary their arms and so could be slingers and archers as well as foot soldiers and cavalry. They tended to serve as scouts and support for the legions as well as engaging in combat in their own right. As of 23 CE they numbered about 150,000 men, which was the same as the legions at the time. The emperor Claudius started the practice of rewarding 25 years of service with citizenship and by the early second century all auxiliaries gained citizenship on discharge.<\/p>\nA key legion that stood apart from the rest of the military was the Praetorian Guard<\/em>, whose major job was defending the emperor himself, followed in priority by the defense of Italy and the city of Rome. The Praetorian Guard started as nine cohorts of 480 men, but later each cohort was grown to 1,000 men. Recruited from the ranks of existing legions, the terms of service in the Praetorian Guard were very attractive: 16 years instead of 25 and pay that was significantly higher. This was a necessity: emperors starting with Claudius knew that they were vulnerable to the Praetorians and needed to keep them happy and loyal.<\/p>\nNot only did the army expand and defend the borders, but it was also important in integrating provincial subjects into Roman culture. A soldier recruited from the provinces had to learn Latin, at least well enough to take orders and respond to them. Auxiliaries served with men from all over the empire, not just their own home regions, and what each soldier had in common was service to Rome. Commanding officers were often from the Latini heartland, forming a direct link to the Roman center. Military families were a reality everywhere, with sons often becoming soldiers after their fathers. Thus, the experience of serving in the legions or the auxiliaries tended to promote a shared sense of Roman identity, even when soldiers were drawn from areas that had been conquered by Rome in the recent past.<\/p>\nIn the provinces, there was a pattern that took place over a few generations. After being conquered by the Romans, there were often resistance movements and rebellions. Those were put down with overwhelming and brutal force, often worse than that of the initial invasion. Eventually, local elites were integrated in the governor’s office and ambitious people made sure their sons learned Latin. Locals started joining the army and, if lucky, returned eventually with money and land to show for it. Roman amenities like aqueducts and baths were built and roads linked the province with the rest of the empire. In short, assimilation happened. A few generations after Roman conquest, many residents in a given province\u2014especially local elites\u2014would identify with Roman civilization. Regular people in the countryside, meanwhile, would at least be obliged to tolerate Roman rule even if they did not embrace it.<\/p>\nRoman Society<\/h2>\nIn this era, Rome stood as a showcase of imperial wealth, marked by monumental architecture, lavish public works, and conspicuous displays of power. The city of Rome itself boasted eleven aqueducts, enormous structures that brought fresh water into the city from miles away. The houses of the rich had indoor plumbing with drains that led to public sewers. There were numerous libraries and temples, along with public sites for recreation, including public baths, racetracks, and the Colosseum which was used primarily for displays of lethal gladiatorial combat.<\/p>\nWe should note that, while the Romans were not known for producing scientists, they are known for their architects and engineers. They mastered the art of building arches and domes to hold up ceilings without interior supports and using only gravity, they could transport water dozens of miles, not just in Rome but in other major cities across the Empire. To accomplish all of this, the Romans used concrete extensively. Many Roman structures have stood the test of time. Indeed, Roman roads were so well built that some survive to the present, now used by cars rather than the horse-drawn carts they were originally built for.<\/p>\nTo reflect their need for uniformity and efficiency, each city built by the Romans in conquered territory was laid out according to careful plans, with streets built in grids and centered on a public forum with public buildings. One of the reasons that the Romans were so effective in assimilating conquered peoples into Roman society was that they built a great deal of infrastructure. Due to this, being conquered by Rome seemed less like a burden when an aqueduct, public baths, and street system appeared within a generation of the Roman conquest\u2014the relative cultural and religious tolerance of Roman culture was also key. All of these cities were linked by the 40,000 miles of roads that stretched across the empire. The primary purpose of these administrative capitals was extracting taxes and other wealth from the local areas and funneling them back to Rome, but they also served as genuine cultural centers. Likewise, even though the roads were often built with troop movement in mind, people everywhere could take advantage of them for trade.<\/p>\nThe empire as a whole enjoyed levels of commercial and agricultural productivity not seen again until the seventeenth century CE. Specialized craftsmen made high-quality goods to be sold on an empire-wide market, with better-off citizens enjoying access to quality tools, dishware, linens, and other goods, both luxury and practical, much of which had been manufactured hundreds of miles away. While the long-term economic pattern was that the wealthier parts of society tended to become even richer at the expense of the common people, there was still a substantial middle class that enjoyed a relatively high standard of living.<\/p>\nSocial Classes<\/h3>\nThis all being said, there were vast social distances that separated elites and commoners. The rich lived in a state of luxury that probably would not be equaled until the Renaissance, but the majority of Romans lived in squalid conditions. Even in the city of Rome itself, most of the citizens lived in squalor, packed into apartment buildings many stories high, made out of flammable wood and looming over open sewers.<\/p>\nMost people in the empire were, of course, poor farmers and only a minority of the imperial population lived in cities. Peasants sometimes joined the army, but most were simply poor folk struggling to get by. The peasant class wasn\u2019t homogenous; most were seasonal laborers or rented from wealthy landowners. Even those that owned farms were perpetually threatened by the predatory rich. Over the centuries, poor farmers found it more and more difficult to hold on to their land, both because they could not compete with the enormous plantations worked by enslaved laborers and because of outright extortion. There are numerous accounts of rich landowners simply forcing small farmers off of land and seizing it. The peasants could not afford to battle the rich in court, and the rich had few scruples about hiring thugs to terrify the peasants into submission. Once in a great while, a poorer Roman citizen could petition an emperor personally for redress and succeed, as could the occasional provincial to a governor, but the immense majority of the time the poor\u2014citizen and non-citizen alike\u2014were simply at the mercy of elite landowners.<\/p>\nOne percent of the population of the empire were members of the aristocracy, those men who were allowed to participate as officials in the imperial government and their families. Imperial Rome was a timocracy, where access to political power was explicitly linked to wealth, a system first introduced by Augustus himself. To serve in the imperial senate required an annual income of 1,000,000 sesterces\u2014the basic coin of the empire. To serve on the governing council of a small city or town required an annual income of 100,000 sesterces. Meanwhile, a typical soldier earned about 1,200 a year, and poor farmers much less. Land ownership was by far the major determinant of wealth, and with the prevalence of slavery, economies of scale dictated that the more land a given family controlled, the more wealth they could generate.<\/p>\nThe overall pattern in the Roman Imperial period is that the wealthy were highly successful in becoming richer from generation to generation, at the expense of the rest of Roman society. Between 1 and 400 CE, the wealth of elite landowners multiplied roughly eightfold with almost no new wealth coming into the Roman economy during that period. A member of the equestrian class in the Empire might have about 17,000 times the annual income of a poor laborer. Thus, as a whole, social mobility was so limited as to be almost nonexistent. Roman elites kept taxes on their own property low, but the provinces were often ruthlessly exploited and overall tax levels were high. The immense majority of Roman citizens and subjects were born into the social class they would stay in for their entire lives regardless of their own intelligence and competence.<\/p>\nStill, while they might prey on poor farmers, elite Romans were well aware of the threat posed by destitute city-dwellers. Thus, one striking characteristic of the Imperial period was “bread and circus government.” Building on a precedent originally established by the Gracchi during the Republic, the imperial state distributed free grain\u2014and, later, wine and olive oil\u2014to the male citizens of the city of Rome. Eventually, other Roman cities adopted the practice as well. In addition, public games and theater performances were free, subsidized by the state or by elites showing off their wealth. Though the modern mind might automatically think of gladiatorial games, the most popular were actually circuses: horse races around a track. Thus, a Roman citizen in one of the large cities could enjoy free bread\u2014although it was not enough to sustain an entire family, necessitating at least some source of supplemental income\u2014and free entertainment. Free bread or not, the average life expectancy in Roman cities was 45 years for men and 34 for women, the latter because of the horrible conditions of bearing children.<\/p>\nMeanwhile, fully 40 percent of the population of the Italian Peninsula were enslaved individuals when Augustus took power. While many were war captives, children born to enslaved women were automatically enslaved as well. Though some were engaged in domestic labor, most were part of the massive labor force on huge plantations and in mines. The conditions of life for enslaved people was often atrocious, and strict oversight and use of violent discipline ensured that no revolt ever succeeded, despite the best efforts of leaders of revolts, like Spartacus in the first century BCE. Relatively large numbers of enslaved people did earn their freedom, and freedmen as a class these freedmen tended to be innovative commercial entrepreneurs, but many had little hope of freedom. Slavery declined by about 200 CE because supplies started drying up and prices rose. After all, without the constant expansion of the empire, the conditions for enslavement were not present. By that time, however, the legal and social conditions of poor farmers had degenerated to the point that they were essentially serfs, unfree rural laborers, and so the system of labor exploitation continued.<\/p>\nLaw<\/h3>\nFor the republican period and the first few hundred years of the Empire, Roman jurisprudence was split in the provinces. Provincial people were accountable to their own legal systems so long as they were loyal to Rome and paid their taxes on schedule. The most famous historical example of the overlapping legal systems of the Empire was the biblical trial of Jesus before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. Pilate tried to hand the case off to the local Jewish puppet king, Herod, who in turn refused it and handed Jesus back over to Pilate. In the end, Jesus was executed by the Roman government for inciting rebellion, using the traditional Roman punishment of crucifixion.<\/p>\nRoman citizens could always appeal to Roman law if they wanted to, even if they lived in a province far from Rome. There were many benefits, not least exemption from the local laws that non-citizens were obliged to follow, and wealthy citizens were exempt from the more horrible forms of punishment and execution as well\u2014such as crucifixion. This changed dramatically in 212 CE when the emperor Caracalla extended citizenship to all free men and women to make it easier to collect taxes. This was an important event because it extended Roman law to almost everyone in the empire.<\/p>\nSome of the concepts and practices of Roman law outlived the empire itself. Rome initiated the tradition of using precedent to shape legal decisions, as well as the idea that there is a spirit to laws that is sometimes more important than a literal interpretation. The Romans were the first to codify the idea that someone accused of a crime was innocent until proven guilty. This was a totally radical idea in the area of justice, which in the rest of the ancient world normally held the accused guilty unless guilt could be conclusively disproved.<\/p>\nMuch of Roman law still seems grossly unfair from a contemporary perspective. In particular, laws came to establish a formal divide between the rich and the poor, even in the case of citizens. The rich were protected from torture and painful execution, while the poor were subject to both. The enslaved were held in such a subservient position by the law that the testimony of one was only allowed in court cases if it had been obtained through torture. Over everything else, the decrees of the emperor were the fundamental basis of law itself. They could not be appealed or contested in the name of some kind of imagined higher authority or written constitution. The emperor did not just enforce the law; he was<\/em> the law.<\/p>\nConclusion<\/h2>\nFor the first two centuries of its existence, Rome was overwhelmingly powerful, and its political institutions were strong enough to survive even prolonged periods of incompetent rule. Trouble was afoot on Rome’s borders, however, as Germanic groups became more populous and better organized, and as the meritocratic system of the \u201cFive Good Emperors\u201d gave way to infighting, assassination, and civil war. At the same time, what began as a Jewish reform movement born in the Roman territory of Palestine was making significant inroads, especially in the eastern half of the Empire. This movement would come to be known as Christianity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-166","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":3,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":167,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/166\/revisions\/167"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/3"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/166\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=166"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=166"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Glanum-stele_legionnaires.jpg\"){kind=link}