The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (9 page)

Perhaps the most prominent of the casualties of these debilitating conflicts, after Caesar himself, was Cicero. In his many surviving letters he reveals his agonies over the turmoil he found around him. Cicero was wedded to the old ideals of public service and the republic, whose virtues he idealized in his De Republica (54 B.C.), a dialogue set in the more harmonious days of the second century, but as chaos grew, he reluctantly accepted that only a strong man could restore order. At first Cicero backed Pompey, even joining him as a noncombatant at Pharsalus. After Pompey’s defeat, he made his peace with Caesar in the hope that the republic would be restored. Inevitably as Caesar’s rule grew more dictatorial, Cicero grew disillusioned. There is no evidence to link Cicero with Caesar’s assassination (although he rejoiced at the news), but when Octavian arrived in Rome, Cicero believed he could use him against Mark Antony. His last great speeches (the Philippics)
⁷
were in support of Octavian against Mark Antony. It proved a fatal miscalculation: when Mark Antony added Cicero to the list of those to be eliminated as enemies of Caesar, Octavian acquiesced. Cicero was hunted down and killed in December 43 B.C. His head was hacked off and mounted— together, at Mark Antony’s request, with the hands which had written the Philippics—on the speaker’s rostrum in the Roman Forum.

Largely excluded from political life by the 40s, Cicero spent his last years writing. Steeping himself in Greek culture, he built, in effect, an enduring bridge over which Greek philosophy passed into the Latin world. The death of his daughter, Tullia, in 45 B.C. led him to explore the effects of grief in his
Consolatio.
He moved on to overtly philosophical issues, epistemology, moral philosophy, the ultimate aims of existence and the nature of the gods. Sceptical by nature, he was nevertheless broad-minded enough to read widely across the various schools of Greek philosophy and to examine issues from different perspectives. His work was marked by a cultivated humanism; he valued cultural diversity and distrusted dogmatism, and to this extent he can be seen as one of the founders of European liberal humanism and a forerunner of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. When the Roman empire fragmented some centuries later and Greek became forgotten in the west, Cicero’s works survived, even if, as a result of Christian opposition to his scepticism (and, of course, paganism), a full appreciation of his work was delayed until the Renaissance.

One of Cicero’s central philosophical interests was the nature of the gods. He was keenly aware of the difficulties of finding any reasoned justification for their existence, while remaining convinced of the importance of belief and ritual in everyday life. The issue had become one of practical politics. In conquering the east, Roman leaders were absorbed into the spiritual traditions of the Greeks and found themselves treated, as successful Hellenistic monarchs had been, as favoured by the gods, perhaps even as divine themselves. While campaigning in the east, Pompey had been addressed as “saviour,” a title used by the Ptolemies, and he had had a cult set up in his honour on the island of Delos and a month named after him in the city of Mytilene. Pompey declined to exploit these honours on his return to Italy, but Caesar proved more susceptible to this form of adulation. He too had been acclaimed in the east as if he were divine and acquiesced in similar acclamations in Rome. He was granted the right to have his own priest, his house was adorned by a pediment as if it were a temple and in state processions his image was placed among those of the gods. A month was named after him in the Roman calendar (it survives today as July). All this no doubt contributed to the unease that led to his assassination. Yet in the backlash following his death all the ancient Roman taboos on making a man divine were ignored, and he was proclaimed to have become a god. The resourceful Octavian subsequently claimed that he was the son (even if only by his adoption) of a god, a title he used with great effect.

When Octavian returned to Rome in 29 B.C. with sixty legions under his command and the wealth of Egypt at his disposal, a military dictatorship must have seemed inevitable, the end to which republican politics had been moving. Yet Octavian had the vision and acumen to realize that it was essential to work within the traditional parameters of republican politics, indeed that he needed to refrain from taking on any of the attributes of dictatorship. He defused the Romans’ fears by disbanding much of his vast army and using his own wealth to settle his veterans as farmers, thus making them reliable supporters of any new settlement. He then embarked on elaborate negotiations with the Senate, encouraging its members to transfer him powers, the consulship and the right to administer provinces, posts with republican precedents, in return for his acquiescence in their traditional status. It was a consummate piece of political manoeuvring in which the reality, a transfer of a wide range of powers into Octavian’s hands, was effectively masked by the deference he showed to the senators and to republican tradition in public. The entire process was smoothed by the near-universal desire among Romans of all classes for peace. In 27 B.C. the Senate’s underlying awe for Octavian was marked by the grant of a new title, Augustus, the “revered one,” which remains the name by which he is known.
⁸

The next forty years (Augustus died in A.D. 14) saw the evolution of what was, in effect, a Hellenistic monarchy. Augustus continued to gather republican offices: he was made a tribune, the traditional representative of the people, and
pontifex maximus,
head of the priesthood; in 2 B.C. he was awarded a new but honorary accolade, pater patriae, “Father of the Fatherland.” While the pretence that the Senate made decisions was maintained, in practice petitions came to Augustus and he increasingly took responsibility for them. To his eastern subjects, this was, of course, entirely familiar; and the Greek cities honoured him with cult worship, often linking his name to the city of Rome. Augustus remained sensitive enough not to institute any comparable cult worship within Rome itself, and he assiduously carried out the traditional religious rituals on which the safety of the state had always been assumed to depend. The massive building programme he initiated in Rome included the restoration of no less than eighty-two temples. He presented himself as the living image of the ancient Roman virtue of
pietas,
in which respect for the gods mingled with that for the fatherland and one’s own family.
⁹

One of the most famous representations of Augustus is on the
Ara
Pacis,
the Altar of Peace, now reconstructed in Rome, where he is shown among his family and prominent officials, modestly veiled and approaching a sacrifice. The primary purpose of the altar was to celebrate the peace brought by Augustus both at home and abroad, but the altar’s iconography also clearly links his success with the past glories of Rome, in, for example, representing Aeneas among others in the reliefs. It was through public images such as this that Augustus made his most sustained assault on power. Almost every image of Augustus reinforced the values of his regime, both applauding its prosperity and stability and presenting it as the culmination of Rome’s long and glorious history. In the great new forum built around a temple to Mars Ultor—Mars as a god of revenge (revenge both against the assassins of Caesar and against the Parthians, by this time the most powerful threat in the east)—Augustus built statues of Rome’s founders (Aeneas and Romulus), and the statesmen and commanders who had made the Roman empire great paraded along the sides, while there was an imposing statue of Augustus himself in a four-horse chariot in the centre. This was the end to which the gods themselves had brought their favoured city.
¹⁰

With Augustus Rome came of age as a city where the predominant culture, in architecture and literature in particular, was Greek, albeit used towards Roman ends and for the celebration of the glory of Augustus’ regime. The procession on the
Ara Pacis
consciously echoed the frieze of the Parthenon in Athens, and it was carved by Greek craftsmen. An entire fifth-century Greek pediment was re-erected in one restored temple to Apollo. (Augustus preferred the restrained serenity of fifthcentury Greek art to the more exuberant creations of the Hellenistic period.) Large spaces surrounded by porticos, theatres and basilicas all echoed Greek models (often mediated through examples from the wealthy Greek cities of southern Italy). In every aspect of culture Greek models were copied but transformed, so as to celebrate the new age. The poet Propertius makes his own debt to Greek literature explicit. He wrote:

I principally claim for my poetry a descent from the ancient lyric and choral poets, especially Sappho and Alcaeus, in spirit and in my verse form; but I write as well in the spirit of Callimachus and his Roman descendants, and in so doing have naturally transformed my original models; further I write with a special purpose, to make thoroughly Italian, in manner and matter, this double Greek inheritance.
¹¹

Propertius is echoed by his contemporaries. Horace’s poetry is steeped in Greek models—Greece, he acknowledges has taken “its captor Rome captive.” In his
Aeneid
Virgil draws on Homer’s epics—the wanderings of the first part of the Aeneid suggest the
Odyssey,
the battles of the second, the
Iliad.
In Book 6 of his epic Virgil sums up the accommodations that have been made between the two cultures.

Others [i.e., the Greeks] will cast more tenderly in bronze
Their breathing figures, I can well believe,
And bring more lifelike figures out of marble:
Argue more eloquently, use the pointer
To trace the paths of heaven accurately
And accurately foretell the rising stars.
Roman, remember by your strength to rule
Earth’s people—for your arts are to be these:
To pacify, to impose the rule of law,
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.
¹²

Virgil was right to stress the success of the Romans as rulers. Not the least of Augustus’ achievements was the creation of a stable system of government for the empire, even though it was often imposed by force. He oversaw a particularly brutal subjugation of Spain and his reign was marked by tough, and on occasions disastrous, campaigns along the northern (German) borders of the empire. However, he recognized the importance of sound governors who would not exploit their position for gain and the advantage for all of the rising tax revenues that a settled empire would bring. Generally the empire prospered during these years.

The pattern of provincial government remained as it had been in republican times. Often, especially in the east, a conquered territory was left in the hands of a client king, who was responsible for its internal government and the maintenance of Rome’s interests in the surrounding territory. Over time the tendency was for client kingdoms to become absorbed into the empire, especially if their rulers made any effective show of independence. They then became provinces, directly governed and taxed by Rome. Alternatively, a subdued territory became a province directly, under the authority of a governor, as did Britain and Gaul (divided into three provinces). Augustus had agreed with the Senate that he would be governor for life of the more vulnerable border provinces of the empire. He had the right to appoint deputies (legates) in these provinces, while the more secure provinces such as Achaia (southern Greece) would have governors selected by lot from senior senators. Augustus’ legates normally served a term of three years.

In areas where there was no immediate security threat, Roman rule was comparatively light. In Judaea at the time of Pontius Pilate, for instance, there were only 3,000 Roman troops in the whole province, and most of these were based on the coast or in strategically placed forts. The secret of such successful administration in the long term lay in the creation of quiescent local elites that had their own interest in keeping good order. In the Greek cities of the east such elites existed already, in the form of ruling classes and the city assemblies, although it took time for them to appreciate the advantages for their own status in acquiescing to Roman rule. In the west, where city life was relatively undeveloped, new elites had to be created from the Celtic peoples, many of whom had been shattered by the campaigns of Julius Caesar.
¹³
It helped enormously that the Romans were tolerant of local deities and that these could be absorbed into the Roman pantheon, as the gods and goddesses of Greece had been some centuries earlier. So the local goddess of the hot springs of Bath, Sulis, was equated with Minerva, while the major Celtic deity Lug was linked with the Roman Mercury. Gradually over the next two centuries Romanization, in terms of a shared Greco-Roman culture, mutually supportive spiritual beliefs and the sense of belonging to a common political entity, took place.
¹⁴

Some areas proved more difficult to govern than others. Among Pompey’s conquests in the east in 63 B.C. was Judaea, which had enjoyed a hundred years of independence under the Hasmonaeans, a family of priests and kings. The Romans proved deeply ambivalent towards Judaism. While they always respected antiquity in any spiritual belief (“[Jewish] rites, whatever their origins, are sanctioned by their antiquity,” as the historian Tacitus put it),
¹⁵
the Romans felt threatened by the exclusivity of monotheism. Roman high-handedness rapidly upset Jewish sensitivities: Pompey could not refrain from displaying Roman dominance by entering the Holy of Holies in the Temple at Jerusalem, and a later emperor, Caligula, caused outrage when he suggested that a statue of himself be placed inside the Temple. However, a way had to be found to rule Judaea. The Romans began by appointing a Hasmonaean, Hyrcanus, as high priest with responsibility to Rome for Judaean good order. Dissensions between Hyrcanus and his relatives rapidly led to the collapse of this arrangement, and the Romans then appointed a king, Herod, a member of a powerful family of Idumaea (southern Judaea) in 37 B.C. Herod wisely married into the Hasmonaean family and sustained himself in power for over thirty years. Although the Jews always distrusted him, he rebuilt the Jerusalem Temple in great splendour, and until the final years of his reign, when he became increasingly brutal, he remained on good terms with the Romans, who were impressed with the skillful way he maintained peace in a difficult territory. When he died in 4 B.C., his territories, which spread far beyond Judaea (into Galilee, for instance), were divided among his three sons. In Galilee Herod Antipas held on to power until A.D. 39 (that is, for the entire period of Jesus’ youth and ministry there). His brother Archelaus, who assumed control over Judaea, was less successful and survived only until A.D. 6, when he was deposed by the Romans after petitions of complaint from the Jews. Judaea then became a Roman province, though the governor was at first a prefect subject to Quirinius, the governor of the neighbouring province of Syria. The tax census conducted by Quirinius (subsequently used by Luke the Evangelist as a means of bringing Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem)
¹⁶
led to outbreaks of serious unrest. Some respect for Jewish feeling was shown by the decision to base the prefect in the prosperous port of Caesarea while giving day-to-day responsibility for order to the high priest in Jerusalem. It always remained possible for the Romans to depose the high priest if he was unsatisfactory, and this system worked effectively for a number of years. Annas, high priest from A.D. 6, was succeeded by his son-in-law Caiaphas, who lasted from c. 18 to 37, the longest term of office recorded under the empire. Only at times of the major Jewish festivals did the prefect move with accompanying Roman soldiers into Jerusalem. Images of Judaea—and in some cases Galilee— groaning under the weight of Roman rule, presented by some historians, have little or no historical backing. Most Jews would never have seen a Roman soldier, although Judaeans, if not the Galileans who paid their tax to Herod Antipas, would have been fully aware that in addition to the dues they paid as Jews to the Temple, their taxes went to Rome.
¹⁷