There are a lot.
First let us unpack the four basic eras that characterize anyplace even somewhat considered Roman. Without this context, and the knowledge that Roman civilization never truly “fell,” one remains in a well of media-bite un-knowing. That’s my nice way of saying one “knows” basically from random references that are always imprecise, especially in cinema. That is not knowing.
If you watched 300 and use it on which to base any pretensions toward understanding the actual Sparta, there’s your example.
It also helps because the Roman timeframe spans at least two millennia. That’s a long time. Two millennia ago, Rome was a great power. Look how much has changed in two millennia. Time in the ancient world took as long as it does now. People lived shorter lives, and lost more lives reproducing, but seventy years were still seventy years. So:
Latin/Etruscan: The traditional date for the founding of Rome is 753 BCE*, which might or might not be accurate but is likely close. Evidence suggests that it represented the joining of several relatively primitive hillside settlements. The first leaders of the bucolic place were Latin kings (no, not gangsters); later kings were from Etruria, an older civilization in a region that would later give Frances Mayes lots to write about. This period lasted about 250 years
Republican: In 509 BCE, we are told with some confidence, the little city bounced its last Etruscan king and established a republic. In the meantime, Carthage was a regional sea power and Persia was finding its full imperial identity. So that’s 240 years, give or take, in which Rome had kings. As a republic, Rome would grow first to dominate the Italian peninsula and associated islands, then the western Mediterranean, and by 27 BCE the entire Mediterranean coast and inland from it to occupy modern France, Iberia, the Balkans minus Romania, and the Near East with some contention.
Five centuries. Five centuries ago, it was 1526. Look what has happened since those early colonial/exploitative years (which basically continued to be colonial and exploitative).
Imperial: Dating this start is a judgment call, but the most common perception is that this begins in 27 BCE and lasts to 476 CE. For the Western Empire, that is fair; this end date is a gross oversimplification, but it does establish five centuries of evolution. Again: five hundred years. The entire history of the United States as an independent nation is half of that.
Byzantine: The customary timeframe in which the Eastern Roman Empire begins to look Byzantine (Hellenized, Orthodox Christian, power base in east only) is about 400 CE under Honorius. Some date it back to 330 CE, but with a gradual and incremental process it’s hard to fix a nice clean point in time. If we use 400 as a start, this period lasted 1053 years.
Now one has a better sense of the vast timespan that applies to the discussion. Armed with it, here are things most people imagine to be true about ancient Rome, yet are not:
Julius Caesar was the first emperor. No. While Gaius Julius Caesar was briefly what we might call a military dictator, Rome had a history of dictators–and it was not usually a bad thing. The Roman Republic would appoint a dictator when the state was in grave danger, and most of them acquitted themselves as noble Romans.
Augustus was emperor. Not precisely so. In fact, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, as he styled himself after G. Julius Caesar adopted him as heir, would have recoiled at the term. What happened was a civil war in which Octavian, later Augustus, emerged as strongman. Perhaps in relief at the end of roughly two decades of internal conflict, Octavian was granted a number of powers which in union amounted to imperial authority–but he called himself Princeps (First Citizen). Far as Augustus was concerned, Rome remained a republic. Well into the 300s, emperors would be bragging about saving the Republic–by then, the thinnest of polite fictions.
Rome persecuted Christians from the start. Not really, because like all movements, the Christian movement started tiny. By 100 CE, Christians numbered themselves perhaps in the high four figures–this in an empire of millions. They had not yet even resolved whether it was necessary to remain an observant Jew in order to be Christian. Except for a few examples, there was minimal early persecution of Christians simply because they weren’t seen as major threats to the state.
Rome fell in 476 CE and that was the end. Nope. What happened is that in the late 200s, the leadership began to divide its regional authority. It was to have an Augustus each in the East and West, whose deputies would be Caesars and would grow into Augusti as the latter retired to dignified gardening or undignified pedophilia or whatever. It worked a little for a short time. By the late 300s the division was more pronounced. The Western Empire did indeed fall in 476, to a (probably) Rugian king known as Odovacar (or Odoacer)–unless you accept its later successor, the Holy Roman Empire, as a lineal descendant. (For the most part, there wasn’t much Holy or Roman about it; it hung around until 1806 in some rump form.) We begin to label the Eastern Empire the “Byzantine Empire” around 400 CE, and it hangs on for another thousand years. It considers itself Roman even though it is essentially Greek.
Caligula (37-41 CE) was the worst emperor ever. He’s a contender, but one among many. Nero (54-68 CE) was one; Elagabalus (218-222 CE) was another. We can fairly say that Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, aka Caligula (“Little Boots”) was among the most sadistic and arguably the nuttiest, but not in the first part of his reign. He didn’t have time to do as much damage as Nero, whose death instigated a civil war and a year with four mainly self-anointed emperors. Maybe if the others had received salacious X-rated movie portrayals…
Constantine I “the Great” made the Empire Christian. Nah. By his time (early 300s CE) much of it already was. Christianity had some inherent strengths that in time attracted enough people to make it a majority faith, and during Constantine’s reign its doctrine had been resolved in many of its minds by the Council of Nicaea (325 CE). I grew up Lutheran, and for confirmation classes I had to learn the Nicene Creed. The third century was a time of Christianity’s popular growth. Only 22 years before Nicaea, Diocletian launched the last serious persecution of Christians. Most of the border “barbarians” were already Christian. Constantine was the first Augustus to openly profess the Christian faith, which made the fourth century the time of Christianity’s rise to dominate both halves of the Empire.
Lead poisoning was a major factor in Roman leaders going crazy. I won’t say it didn’t play a part, but everyone drank the water from lead piping. If there’s evidence that everyone was nutty, I might buy that; I don’t know of such evidence. I’m also uncertain that the pipes wouldn’t have scaled up with a coating, maybe calcium carbonate.
The Western Empire fell because of internal corruption and social inequities. Not well supported (though it certainly did not help much). Social inequities were nothing new even in Augustus’s Roman times; scholars like to advance the social argument, I believe, because it fits their world views and avoids talking about yucky warfare (a thing one observes studying collegiate ancient history).
A more reasonable explanation is large numbers of Germanic and other peoples, under Hunnic pressure, wanting to live within the large and unwieldy Empire. Once they could advance and occupy Roman provinces, typically those provinces shifted from remitting taxes to Rome (which spent a majority of its revenue on “defense”) to requiring tribute payments in order to pause attacking. Those provinces went from revenue centers to cost centers, reducing the funding available for new military units to drive out the invaders. Often the invaders were recruited themselves into the Roman military, but were at times betrayed and at other times of questionable loyalty.
Do this enough times, in enough places, and the Western Empire at least could not offer decisive resistance. For comparison, imagine you own an apartment building, and gangsters move into a vacant apartment. The police are afraid of them, or not as ruthless. The intruders laugh at your demand for rent, and raise it with a demand you pay them rent not to take over more units. You pay up, but they get annoyed with you and take some anyway. How are those economics working out for you while the gangsters flip you off and the police cower?
Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Nero played the lyre, not the fiddle (invented only about 1500 years after his death). Imagine Drumpf with yearning to be a rock star, and you have Nero’s basic presentation. There’s uncertainty about how the fire started in 64 CE (four years before Nero’s welcome demise); our surviving version of Tacitus blames Christians, but the good sense of that version raises questions of much later alteration. Nero was not in Rome when this fire began to devastate 3/4 of the city, but quickly returned to Rome and launched relief efforts. Some of them were quite self-serving, but he certainly did not ignore the catastrophe. It had overwhelmed first responders, as would most city-wide conflagrations in cities of a million or more.
Nero stands accused of having caused it in order to rebuild Rome to his taste, and his behavior doesn’t entirely refute that, but I don’t find the accusation credible to explain the start. All that said, there is at least some reason to think Nero himself blamed Christians for the fire. How and why a tiny minority cult would do such a thing makes little sense to me in hindsight; then again, much of what Nero did also makes little sense to me.
The Roman military was always fearsome. Replace “always” with “at times” and you’re more accurate. Starting as a land power, the Roman republic didn’t develop a navy worth the name until the Punic (Carthaginian) Wars; those started in 264 BCE. The land forces were pretty refined, but with generals often outthought/outmaneuvered, notably by Hannibal in three consecutive Second Punic War battles. The Republic eventually reorganized its legions, which for the first two hundred years of the Empire retained similar form–but Republic and Empire both depended upon auxilia. Many of its cavalry, for example, were Germanic. Provincial recruit cohorts (essentially battalions) were definitely a cut below the legionary standard.
Roman military engineering and discipline were very good, but legions weren’t the entire Roman military. There had long been auxilia; sometimes cohorts of provincial recruits, sometimes specialists such as slingers or light infantry. As time went on, border provinces raised frontier troops of variable quality for local service. And the Praetorian Guard might have been the worst thing to happen at Rome, developing from a capital-based protective force into just one of many competing military accumulations selecting Imperial contenders and butchering them whenever they’d spent their last bonus aurei. By the 300s, the Imperial armies less resembled their ancestors and started more to resemble the barbarian forces they were expected to fight. They were also losing to the latter more frequently. Some prowess was restored under Byzantine overlordship, but as before, the Byzantines were Roman in name only.
Now here are some things you might not know, but would wish to:
The early Imperial army (and late Republican) did not move very quickly, but it moved in like mold in a badly maintained house. Every afternoon, early Imperial troops halted for the day and built a fort to sleep in. Roman civil engineering is famous, but their military engineering also deserves major respect for bridging, fortifications, and siegecraft. Once that army came, it or its successors never left. People knew this and it demoralized resistance. “Sure, get a bunch of your people killed; you’ll get some of us. Then there will another army, and this one will have serious blood in its eyes.” For the first couple of centuries this was true in the main; then Rome’s problems began shifting more to the defensive.
Rome was a sort of religious Borg when it came to conquest. As the state faith and state were inseparable, Romans invading would not only not disrespect locally worshipped gods, but would try to suborn to them: “Gods of the Perquacki, if you abandon these people and support us, we will preserve your worship.” From their perspective, it seemed to work.
Republican Rome took most of its institutional existence to consolidate the Italian peninsula. During that time there were regular tribal wars between Rome and other cities/regions within Italy, extending into the first century BCE. The end of the Republic was more or less also the end of Italian ethnic division as a political factor; thereafter divisions were more those of wealth and social rank (or absence thereof).
What you saw on the subscription series Rome was very late Republican Rome. I liked it; it had many authentic touches, such as the large curved horns called cornua. It covered much of the Republic’s final quarter century, starting in Gaul then leading to Caesar’s primacy and thereafter to the struggles of Antony and Cleopatra. While ethnic Romans looked down upon late Ptolemaic Egypt as a degraded and effete shell of its former martial self, they also knew it was Rome’s breadbasket.
A tribune was an official. You see (or saw) newspaper titles referring to the Here-or-There Tribune; the term arises from the Roman Republic’s officials appointed to protect the public interest. You’ve heard the term “plebeian”; here’s its origin. These were styled Tribunes of the Plebs (commoners), to distinguish them from military tribunes who might command a legion in combat. It is evident why newspapers chose the title, as it makes more sense in social context than say, Laramie Boomerang.
The Republic’s elected officials included dictators, consuls, praetors, censors, quaestors, and aediles. Consuls numbered two; in times of grave danger, the Senate would issue a Last Decree calling upon a particular citizen (typically a retired general) to become dictator, with the expectation that a noble Roman would immediately hand this title back when the crisis passed. Cincinnatus (yes, that’s where we get it, including the society of descendants of George Washington) was held up as the ideal dictator for his (likely embellished) sixteen-day un-retirement, victory, and re-retirement.
Praetors were junior to consuls, and discharged various officials not so different from modern cabinet/government ranks. The censor was singular or one of two, he had the combined duties of taking the census (obviously), governing public morality, and some other duties. Aediles and quaestors were more junior, not uncommon stepping stones for ambitious young patricians seeking to rise in power and public esteem. Then as now, one paid one’s dues, proved one’s worth to seek greater responsibility.
The Praetorian Guard was not really very praetorian, at least later on. This aforementioned internal security force morphed over time into essentially an organized crime gang. My friend Peter asked an excellent question as to why it was allowed to continue for so long when there were civil wars with Roman fighting Roman; why not stamp it out? I think because there was rarely a situation where that was considered both feasible and necessary by those seeking power. Most civil wars happened mostly outside Italy, and marching on Rome itself was a big deal. My take is that most emperors and usurpers were afraid of the consequences; zoomed out in the fullness of time, we can see that they were a toxic political force for centuries. Seen from the perspective of a given time, however, I think most leaders considered it safer to buy their support. To destroy them would have been impossible to prepare for in secrecy (a couple legions headed for Rome not being easy to conceal).
For an analogy, one might ask why neither the Soviet Army nor the Communist Party of the USSR ever destroyed the KGB. The suggestion that one might be preparing to do so was likely to be discovered, with fatal consequences.
Rome invented tourism. It was not always safe, nor was it always comfortable, but control of the Mediterranean and an extensive road network did make this possible for those hardy and/or wealthy enough to take the chance. It was safer than it would have been, at least in the first couple centuries CE.
Alexander didn’t conquer Rome mainly because he went the other direction. Could he have taken Rome? In the 330s BCE, I don’t think it was impossible, at that phase in Roman development and Macedonian/Hellenistic ascendancy. Alexander considered himself Greek, led a primarily Greek military, and saw Persia (a threat to Greek independence when Rome was a republic in diapers) as the main enemy. He had no way of imagining that the podunk capital of some Italian province called Latium would one day sit on nearly the entire Greek world, some three centuries after his untimely death.
Plus, imagine how bad he would have looked with his whole army beating up a backwater peninsula only to get word that the Persian military was conquering his home country.
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*This stands for “Before Christian Era.” This is not me kowtowing to a religious faith I do not embrace. I reject “Before Common Era.” This is me recognizing that:
- Every civilization has a dating system;
- Every civilization is entitled to a dating system;
- A dating system typically emanates from what is perceived as a seminal event (which might or might not have occurred).
However you feel about Christianity–I’m a survivor of Christian religiously motivated abuse with my own ax to grind, and I’m not even positive Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure–but only an ignoramus or someone pretzeling history with an agenda can try to deny the impact of a belief system that became dominant in its part of the world and went to war over beliefs (at least nominally; war is always over money and power and ego, in actual fact).
If we’re to have a dating system that doesn’t refer to Christianity, all right; why are we still starting it at a supposed time of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth? Just changing the name simply endorses the supposed founding event by maintaining the date. Maybe it should start with 480 BCE, date of the battle of Marathon. Or 509 BCE, attributed date for the overthrow of the last Tarquin king at Rome.
Plus, “Common Era” means nothing. When was the Uncommon Era? What’s Common about it? Who came up with that term? Did they even think? Can we get a Rare Era? Common to who and what? This is preposterous. I’ll go with removing AD because “Anno Domini” assumes belief. BCE, for example, no more assumes belief than AH (After Hegira; the Islamic lunar dating system), JE (Jewish Era; I think we’re in the 5700s now), BE (Buddhist Era), and so on.
I realize that this view automatically gets me kicked out of some treehouse clubs, which is fine. If I have to embrace silliness to be a club member, that club and I are better off without one another.
The Editorial Maverick 