The roman empire a very short introduction pdf

Imperial power 3. Collusion 4. History wars 5. Christians to the lions 6. Living and dying 7. All rights reserved. Sign in to annotate. Delete Cancel Save.

Thru the Bible Vol. Vernon McGee. What are They Saying about the Historical Jesus? What in the World is Going On? Henrietta C. Who Made Early Christianity? Gager, Jr.

Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? It had a population of sixty million people spread across lands encircling the Mediterranean and stretching from drizzle-soaked northern England to the sun-baked banks of the Euphrates in Syria, and from the Rhine to the North African coast.

It was, above all else, an empire of force - employing a mixture of violence, suppression, order, and tactical use of power to develop an astonishingly uniform culture. This Very Short Introduction covers the history of the Empire from Augustus the first Emperor to Marcus Aurelius, describing how the empire was formed, how it was run, its religions and its social structure.

It examines how local cultures were romanised and how people in far away lands came to believe in the emperor as a god. The book also examines how the Roman Empire has been considered and depicted in more recent times, from the writings of Edward Gibbon, to the differing attitudes of the Victorians and recent Hollywood blockbuster films.

These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Beale Crucify! Johnson Genesis: History, Fiction, or Neither? Ehrman How Long, O Lord? The conduct of both was to be modelled on the existing cult of Zeus.

The text was proudly inscribed along with the instructions given to the envoys charged with informing the emperor in person. In their speech before 26 Imperial power 4. Claudius triumphs over Britannia.

In Gaul too, as throughout the empire, emperor-worship was often a matter of hotly contested social prestige. In the late s, the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus intervened to prevent the costs of the priesthood at Lugdunum modern Lyon in southern France , the centre of the imperial cult in Gaul, escalating further through the rivalry of its incumbents. Each sought to outdo the last by the provision of ever more lavish gladiatorial games.

A decree issued by the Senate in Rome set maximum prices for gladiators and capped the charges levied by their trainers. The desire for a glorious public display to celebrate the divinity of the emperor had to be balanced against the need to ensure that the imperial priesthood should not become prohibitively expensive. Surrounding the Forum, their imposing temples and monuments dominated the political and religious centre of empire.

Apotheosis of Antoninus Pius and Faustina. Relief from the base of Column of Antoninus Pius, Rome, now in the Vatican Museums 29 Imperial power two years after his assassination.

In the ensuing civil wars this startling epithet emphasized his divine favour. It also offered one explanation for his victory. At times such wondrous moments of apotheosis in as much as they could ever be faithfully represented might require more elaborate imagining.

A relief on the base of a column erected shortly after AD to honour the recently deceased emperor Antoninus Pius showed both the emperor and his wife Faustina who had died 20 years earlier carried heavenwards on the back of a splendidly winged youth.

The Roman Empire Modern viewers sometimes stare at such arresting images with blank incredulity. In the ancient world, these were not clearly delimited polar opposites. Rather, religious imagery and religious language were an inseparable part of Roman political vocabulary.

It could connect individuals and communities, whether in Ephesus, Aphrodisias, Mytilene, or Gaul, to a single imperial centre. It could integrate traditional gods and long-standing local beliefs within a ritual framework reduplicated across the whole Mediterranean. It could provide a language for comprehending absolute power. For wealthy men like Caius Vibius Salutaris, supreme in their own communities, to be seen to bow in obeisance to another human being would be to risk unthinkable social humiliation; but to worship a god offered local grandees a way of recognizing their inferiority without any loss of face.

Above all, it openly paraded their membership of a world-wide imperial society. A fragmentary list of proverbial questions and answers preserved on a scrap of papyrus from 2nd-century Egypt succinctly sums up such an 30 attractive view of the hierarchies imposed by empire — on both heaven and earth.

What is a god? The exercise of power. What is a ruler? Like a god. The problems of proximity This dissonance between autocracy — godlike in its exercise of absolute power — and the all too mortal failings of those who ruled the Roman empire might at times, and understandably, provoke some amusement. The best wisecracks were made by emperors themselves. Seneca imagined the deceased Claudius standing on the celestial threshold of Olympus loudly demanding admission.

Somewhat taken aback, Jupiter put the request to the assembled divinities. Was it for this that I curbed civil wars?

Who will worship this man as a god? Who will believe in him? As long as you make gods of this sort, no one will believe that you are gods yourselves. Claudius was summarily ejected from heaven and dragged down by Mercury to eternal punishment in the Underworld. For all their biting wit, such humorous burlesques should be taken seriously. The problem was less one of accepting the authority of a living emperor, than of constructing a moral framework which might enable imperial actions to be judged.

Those responsible for keeping the peace had always to be prepared to go to war. Those responsible for justice had always to check their emotions and their language. You may think it hard that monarchs should be deprived of that freedom of speech which even the humblest enjoy. Are you not aware that supreme power means noble slavery for you? The slavery of being supremely great lies in the impossibility of ever becoming anything less. This restraint you have in common with the gods.

They too are held tightly bound to the heavens. That emperors, although godlike in their possession of imperial power, might also be bound by a moral code which could reasonably 32 The emperor is one of us, and his superiority is greater and more conspicuous because he thinks of himself as one of us, and bears in mind that he is a man just as much as a ruler over men.

For when a man can advance no further than the highest rank, the only way he can go even higher is by stepping down. It is never easy to praise an autocrat to his face. For Pliny, what was at stake as in Ephesus or Aphrodisias was the assertion of some connection between his audience and the emperor. In Rome in September , the distinguished senator Pliny the Younger delivered a speech before Trajan and the Senate thanking the emperor for the award of a consulship.

Above all, Pliny praised Trajan for his ciuilitas: for his behaviour as a citizen amongst citizens collectively bound by the rule of law and a mutual respect for social status. Like Pliny, Suetonius was explicit in his moral judgements.

He offered both praise and condemnation, the latter possible at a suitable distance. All of his imperial subjects were safely dead: Domitian, the last emperor in the Lives of the Caesars, died a generation before Suetonius wrote.

As a biographer, Suetonius aimed above all to reveal the secret springs of human action. Good emperors could be distinguished by their virtues: liberality, ciuilitas, moderation, clemency. Their personal merits and well-regulated private lives mirrored a political programme which respected the position and importance of the wealthy elite in Rome. His lack of expense on furniture and household goods may be seen from the couches and tables which are still in existence.

They say that he did not sleep on any bed unless it was low and plainly furnished. He was a frugal eater for I would not even omit this detail and usually ate simple fare. In this topsy-turvy world, an emperor who in public was alleged to break all the bounds of decency by ordering senators to run alongside his chariot, could also be believed in private to indulge in extravagant banquets and extraordinary sexual exploits with men, women, the wives of senators, and even his own sisters.

It was the prelude to a cynical land grab. On a hectare site in the centre of the city the emperor constructed a new palace in beautifully landscaped pleasure gardens.

The moral lesson was clear. Cornelius Tacitus — a contemporary of both Pliny and Suetonius — is one of the most subtle historians and sophisticated political commentators whose works survive from Antiquity.

Here too the emperor performed. Here too a small audience of courtiers and the imperial family tried to second-guess the plot in order to know when to applaud, when to speak, and when to remain silent. One of the most memorable scenes in the Annals opens with the imperial household dining together in a seemingly convincing picture of familial conviviality. During the dinner, Britannicus collapsed.

As the young prince expired, Nero observed that nothing unusual was happening. The boy was epileptic and would soon recover. The more adept stayed in their places. Agrippina agreed, genuinely expecting according to Tacitus to enjoy herself.

Moreover, Nero had ordered a new and lavishly appointed boat to convey her across the bay following a banquet at which he had been particularly attentive and loving. On a bright starlit night, not far from shore, disaster struck. All seemed to go as Nero planned: the boat collapsed — as perhaps it had really been designed to do.

This was to be another murder. But Agrippina and her maid Acerronia, saved by the stout sides of the couches on which they were reclining, were not crushed to death. In the confusion that followed, they were pitched into the water. All — some knowingly, some accidentally, some unwillingly — are inescapably trapped in a web of dissimulation and deceit.

But her acting was too good; the crew beat her to death with boat hooks and oars. Agrippina herself remained silent and, only slightly wounded, made it safely to shore.

Despite suspecting the attempt on her life, Agrippina at once sent her trusted servant Agermus to announce to Nero that she had narrowly survived an accident. Troops were sent to kill Agrippina who had, so the emperor alleged, clearly intended the death of her own son. Those at court wondered how to react to the news. But Nero himself went tearfully into mourning for the death of his mother.

The Roman Empire political world as a stage, on which all perform and few if any write their own script, is seductive. Here there can be no heroes. Seneca, since his body, old and emaciated by his frugal way of living, only allowed his blood to issue slowly, severed the arteries both in his leg and behind the knee.

There is no room for a genuinely cheering crowd; no room for any real support — aristocratic, popular, or provincial. Next to the cool literary histories of Tacitus and Suetonius, we should set extravagant processions, expensive sculptured panels, grandiloquent speeches, and impressive inscriptions.

In the end, this is not about judging the plausibility of one account against another. But we might come closer to appreciating the variety of ways in which imperial power was understood and represented in the Roman world. In mid 1st-century Aphrodisias, those responsible for the sculptural programme in the two porticoes fronting the temple to the imperial cult commissioned two marble panels in honour of Nero.

Like the 39 Imperial power Of course, other versions of Nero may be equally as convincing or as implausible — or as ultimately unknowable — as the one offered by Tacitus. Both Suetonius always keen to assert the continued importance of the pretensions and prejudices of the Roman elite and Tacitus for whom power tends inevitably to corrupt are themselves part of a debate about how imperial power should be conceived. Simply because they may seem at times to appeal more directly to modern sensibilities, this does not of itself make their accounts more accurate or credible.

Both have their own artful agendas of which their readers should be acutely and uncomfortably aware. The Roman Empire images of other Roman emperors, these were part of an extensive scheme which included heroes from Greek mythology and the Olympian gods. In the second, he wears full military dress, 6.

Nero and Agrippina. Relief from the temple complex for the imperial cult, Aphrodisias 40 holds a spear and probably an orb, and is crowned with a laurel wreath by his mother Agrippina, who holds in her left hand a cornucopia a horn of plenty overspilling with grapes and pomegranates. These are arresting visions of a powerful, godlike emperor.

They are open celebrations of the continued might and prosperity of the Roman empire. As images of imperial power these two panels should not be too hastily dismissed — even if a historian like Tacitus might only glance at them with a wry, ironic smile. Imperial power 41 Chapter 3 Collusion Ruling the Roman empire At the beginning of the 2nd century AD, a decade after he had offered a subtle and complex speech of thanks for his consulship, Pliny the Younger was sent by the emperor Trajan to govern the province of Bithynia-Pontus on the southern shore of the Black Sea.

In his letters home, Pliny advertised his zeal in carrying out his mandate. Over a two-year period he contacted Trajan 61 times on a wide range of issues, in 39 cases submitting matters for decision or approval. He reported on the failure to complete two aqueducts at Nicomedia, on subsidence in a half-built theatre at Nicaea, and on an over-ambitious scheme to construct new baths at Claudiopolis. Pliny was the exception, not the rule. For the most part, Roman governors were reactive, not proactive.

They did not interfere in the internal affairs of cities in their provinces. They responded to situations or disputes as requested or obliged. They were authorities to whom locals might appeal, rather than investigating magistrates acting on their own initiative.

It is unlikely that Pliny was able to rely on more than trained bureaucrats to help him carry out his duties in Bithynia-Pontus. Militarized frontier provinces, where the possibility of revolt or attack demanded greater vigilance, provided larger staffs. They exceeded the expected norms of Roman imperial government. The Roman Empire This is a tiny number, especially to those accustomed to the close regulation imposed by modern states with their far-reaching policies and programmes.

To give some crude sense of scale: to service a population roughly the same as that of the Roman empire, the British government currently employs around half a million bureaucrats. That said, Roman government never attempted nor thought it necessary or desirable to provide mass education, housing, health, or social security. The Roman empire can hardly be said to have been over-governed.

Small-town society This minimalist state of affairs was one which many in the provinces were eager to preserve. It was attractively sited on a broad terrace below Mount Olympus, the highest peak in Bithynia. Under the supervision of the council a system of local rents, indirect taxes such as customs duties , and special levies provided funds for the running of the city: the provision of a police force, the supervision of the grain supply to ensure the availability of reasonably priced bread, the maintenance of the sewage system, the upkeep of public buildings and streets, the supply of fuel for the public baths, the regulation of private construction, and the control of weights and measures.

They expected their elevated position in society to be recognized and valued by all. A snobbish, self-regarding, and inward-looking set, they watched each other jealously in a continuous and hard-fought battle for status. Time was spent in a carefully organized round of engagements dinner-parties, hunting, the performance of public duties , in the studied exercise of elaborate social etiquette, and in the slow and intricate manoeuvring which characterizes any small, privileged group tightly bound by the twin concerns of inheritance and marriage.

For Dio Chrysostom, it was this freedom from imperial interference that underpinned the continued vitality of small-town society. Dio claimed to have shouldered more than his fair share of public expenditure, nor, he alleged, was he amongst the wealthiest in Prusa. He recommended that the assembly move to elect suitable grain commissioners from those who had not yet put their private fortunes to public use.

This was a double rebuke: both to the citizenry to cease pressing its claims through violence and to his fellow-councillors who, Dio pointedly observed, were collectively responsible for ensuring that Prusa was properly governed. To fail in this joint enterprise was to risk the unwelcome intervention of the Roman authorities. Nothing which happens in the cities goes unnoticed by the governors; on the contrary, just as the families of children who have been naughty at home report them to their teachers, so the misbehaviour of the assembly is reported to them.

In the mid 2nd century, Aelius Aristides, another famous Greek orator, delivered a panegyric in exuberant praise of Rome. For Aristides, what marked out the Roman empire as exceptional was its welcome lack of interest in regulating the day-to-day affairs of local communities. In the most peaceful regions of the empire such as Asia Minor, there might be no more than troops garrisoned in a whole province.

Of course, large forces could quickly be called in, but importantly in towns across the Mediterranean the permanent presence of armed troops was not part of the machinery of Roman rule.

Indeed, for many in the provinces Roman dominance was most felt in its strengthening of the ability of existing oligarchic cliques to exercise unrivalled control in their localities. Similarly, in the western provinces, effective Roman government depended on an intimate relationship with local strongmen. Those chieftains who supported Roman rule found their status as the most prominent people in their region after the Roman governor reinforced by their close connection with the might of empire.

They were now more secure in the possession of their power and wealth than they had ever been before the Roman conquest. Throughout the cities of the Mediterranean world Roman rule shored up local elites. It guaranteed their importance and their authority. Even the most irksome of imperial demands, the annual payment of tribute, could be turned to advantage.

For these notables the pressures of imperial government were both a potential source of gain and the basis of their local power. The needs of empire legitimized the sometimes violent extraction of often meagre surpluses from smallholders.

On the estates of the wealthy, peasant farmers were doubly bound, both as tenants and taxpayers. They gained access to the protection offered by Roman law, and, for the wealthiest and most ambitious, to high-ranking positions in the imperial administration or army. The possession of Roman citizenship publicly marked out a group who together could fairly claim full membership of a coherent Mediterranean-wide community of mutually convergent interests. In extending its citizenship the Roman empire was strikingly more generous than other ancient — and many modern — states.

In democratic Athens of the 5th century BC, for example, only those 49 Collusion The prospect of citizenship also helped ensure that the ruling elites in the mosaic of towns which together made up the empire would seek to reconcile local and imperial loyalties.

In — the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus conferred citizenship on the family of Julianus, one of the leaders of the Zegrenses, an ethnic group living high up in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. For those who wished to emulate such success and the emperors were eager to encourage others the message was clear. The Roman Empire with both a citizen mother and father could themselves be classed as citizens. Conquerors and conquered could now both describe themselves as Roman.

The monumental urge The most visible celebration of security and prosperity in the provinces was the extensive programme of monumental building undertaken at private expense.

The porticoes, libraries, temples, arches, baths, and theatres most often admired by modern visitors are in many cases the result of this selfserving upsurge in public generosity and the often extravagant desire by the wealthy to mark out their city as fully part of an empire of cities. In the mid 2nd century AD, Lucius Cosinius Primus, one of the leading citizens of Cuicul modern Djemila in Algeria , funded the building of a splendid new market place.

A rectangular portico 24 by 22 metres enclosed a square containing a hexagonal, 50 colonnaded pavilion 5 metres in diameter. In Rome itself the Great Market was built to surpass a much older building probably also burned down in AD 64 originally commissioned in the early 2nd century BC by Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, consul and successful general, to the ground-plan which was to become standard: a rectangular enclosure with a pavilion at its centre.

This Roman original was copied in the town of Lepcis Magna on the coast of modern Libya. The dedicatory inscription marking the end of building work in 8 BC linked the donor, Annobal Tapapius Rufus, with the ruling emperor, Augustus.

This was an impressive achievement. Rufus paraded his generosity in a number of 51 Collusion Importantly too, this design was self-consciously imitative.

The Great Market consisted of a large, open square enclosed by a two-storey portico; at its centre stood an equally grand circular pavilion. This was a design repeated across the empire. To build a market place modelled on the Great Market in Rome was evidence of a close connection with metropolitan fashion. In a distant provincial town it advertised a knowledge both of the imperial capital and of an international style.

The Roman Empire 7. Market place, Lepcis Magna prominently placed inscriptions, two cemented in above the main doors onto the stage in full view of the audience. Here in the theatre, the local elite could put themselves on show. Over the next century and a half, the wealthy of Lepcis Magna competed to outdo Rufus by funding ever more splendid additions: 52 8.

Half a Mediterranean world away in Apamea in western Syria , Lucius Julius Agrippa proclaimed his generosity to the city following a serious earthquake in AD The Roman Empire commentary on the ambitions of those aspiring performers who competed for prizes in the adjacent hall.

He himself had sponsored distributions of grain and expensive olive oil to his fellow-citizens. In the mids Caius Julius Demosthenes, a wealthy citizen in the undistinguished city of Oenoanda in south-western Turkey, proposed to endow a four-yearly cultural festival which was to run for three weeks and include competitions in poetry, comic and tragic acting, singing accompanied by the lyre, and oratory.

The council has commended Demosthenes for his unstinting goodwill towards his home town and for his present love of honour, his unsurpassed magnanimity, and for his devotion to the divinelyfavoured emperors and has honoured him with every honour.

Extravagant inscriptions were matched by idealized images. In towns throughout the empire, the grandiloquent claims of leading citizens to admiring accolades were permanently chiselled in stone. Lasting memorials to near-bankrupting gestures of generosity set a marker against which rivals or newcomers were forced to compete. A splendid mid 3rd-century mosaic from a substantial country house at Smirat in modern Tunisia challenged those who saw it to think about their position in the world.

In the centre a young servant holds a large silver tray with four bulging money-bags. A long text worked into the mosaic records the acclamations of the crowd. Mosaic honouring Magerius from his country house at Smirat, now in Sousse Museum, Tunisia house, the large mosaic commemorating his achievements carefully preserved that precious moment of public praise for privileged private viewing. It was an attempt to make an instant of unchallenged social superiority last a lifetime. This is what it is to be powerful!

Their experience of empire was often much more complex than a clear-cut choice between opportunistic complicity in the enforcement of Roman rule or inevitable oppression by a conquering power.

One shows the poet Virgil seated with an open scroll in his hand. In his biography of Cnaeus Julius Agricola, posted to Britain as governor in AD 77, the historian Cornelius Tacitus offered a barbed commentary on the promotion of empire. Behind Virgil stand Melpomene and Calliope, the Muses of tragedy and epic.

Calliope reads from a scroll, Melpomene, holding a tragic mask, listens intently. It might be taken as evidence of the wholesale absorption by African elites of one of the key elements of Roman imperial ideology. But there are other possibilities. Far away from metropolitan Rome in North Africa — the North Africa of a defeated Carthage — the story of Aeneas might have been thought about differently. Nor should that enthusiasm for the common culture of empire be seen as in some way diminished or faked if it also stood alongside a recognition that much of North Africa had once been under Carthaginian rule.

After all, the government of the Roman empire depended on a welding together of local and imperial interests to the mutual advantage of rulers and ruled. It was an accommodation that might also admit of the maintenance of local traditions and sensibilities without these inevitably being seen as indications of resistance. He certainly wished to present himself to his peers as well versed in the Latin classics.

The Roman Empire perceived provincial resistance hung like a storm cloud over the towns of empire. In the face of reprisals, local status or even Roman citizenship counted for little. When the condemned man appealed against the sentence on the grounds that he was a Roman citizen, Galba instructed that — in public recognition of his superior status — his cross should be set up higher than the rest and painted white.

When push came to coercive shove, local elites — for all their much-prized autonomy and hard-won possession of Roman citizenship — were inescapably part of an empire. Hadrian had long paraded his love of Greek culture.

The Library enclosed a quadrangle surrounded by a vast hundred-column portico of luxurious violet-veined Phrygian marble from quarries in Asia Minor; the interior with its shining gilt ceilings was sumptuously decorated with rare paintings and statues, and expensively embellished with translucent alabaster. This was imperial architecture at its most extravagant.

Building work had been sporadic and costly; the most recent patron, a century before Hadrian, was the emperor Augustus. Clearly visible on the top of the Acropolis which rises behind the Olympieion is the Parthenon. High above the city, the Parthenon stood as an enduring symbol of Athenian independence and a reminder of one of the most remarkable political experiments in Antiquity.

Olympieion in Athens, with the Acropolis and Parthenon behind Other cities sought to secure their place in this privileged Hellenic past. Cibyra in south-western Turkey had been cited by the early 1st-century geographer Strabo as a non-Greek foundation. Over a century later, in a successful bid to join the Panhellenion, the city had fabricated a completely different account of its origins connecting it closely with both Sparta and Athens.

It brought together in a single institutional framework many cities that had never before been connected and indeed in the past had often been bitter enemies. In addition, he inaugurated the Hadrianeia a festival associated with emperor-worship and the Olympieia associated with Olympian Zeus. Hadrian also conferred the same status on the Panathenaea.

Theseus had ruled Athens after his return from Crete, where he had secured lasting fame by escaping from the labyrinth and slaying the Minotaur. A fractured past was to be forgotten. A Roman emperor could at last succeed where Greek history had so obviously failed.

The extensive re-modelling of the city — now more Greek than any other — was celebrated in the recently completed temple to Olympian Zeus. Behind the temple towered a colossal statue of the emperor erected in his honour by the Athenians. The message was clear. What matters is not whether the beautiful gold funerary masks and valuable grave goods which Schliemann found actually belonged to the victors of the Trojan War, but that Pausanias reliably reported a tradition of ancient burial already 1, years old when he visited the ruins of Mycenae.

Like any good guide, Pausanias does not offer an exhaustive catalogue of everything that can be seen. Rather, he presents a very particular view of the territory through which he travels. In the Agora, he lingers over those monuments that mark the foundation of the city, celebrate the heroic deeds of Theseus, or 66 commemorate the central role of the Athenians in resisting the Persian invasions of the 5th century BC.

It measures his restoration of Greek culture against the surviving traces which reveal the overwhelming superiority of the original. Moving now from the Agora up to the Acropolis, Pausanias notes, merely in passing, that a statue of Hadrian had been placed in the Parthenon.

A shield is placed at her feet and just next to the spear is a serpent. Here there is no time to stare in admiration at the achievements of a Roman emperor, what matters are the reminders of a mythical Greek past. Rather than looking up at the towering columns of the temple or gazing in awe at the crowd of bronze Hadrians that populated its precinct, the visitor is deftly guided to the edge of a muddy depression about 40 centimetres wide. It links both tourist and reader to the very beginnings of Greece.

The Roman Empire Remains of the Temple to Rome and Augustus on the Acropolis in Athens, in front of the east end of the Parthenon past to be interrupted.

Few of the monuments he points out are later than the 3rd century BC. At Corinth, most of the city is passed over in silence; it had been razed by a victorious Roman army in BC and refounded a century later by Julius Caesar. What matters instead are the ancient stories of Corinthian kings, gods, and heroes. In visiting Patrae modern Patras on the southern shore of the Gulf of Corinth , Pausanias noted that the city had been substantially enlarged by the emperor Augustus, who had systematically destroyed surrounding settlements and transplanted their populations.

The disruptive consequences were still painfully evident to the discerning observer. For his fellow-travellers, Pausanias offered the comfortable experience of a tour through an imaginary Greece. Parallel pasts The Roman Empire If Pausanias sought to expunge the all too visible impact of foreign conquest on an enchanted classical landscape, the historian and philosopher Plutarch — also responding to the intrusion of a new imperial power in an old world — sought rather to coordinate and compare the habits and histories of both the Greeks and the Romans.

The principal purpose of these Parallel Lives was to offer a series of historical scenarios which would encourage readers to consider the ethical issues involved. Taken together the paired biographies invited the reader to think through particular problems: how to control passions anger, desire, and ambition ; how to judge the effects of up-bringing and education; how to display humanity, forbearance, and compassion. Both Greeks and Romans provided positive and negative examples.

Pericles and Fabius offered models of wise statesmen who faced with the perils of war stand calm against a protesting mob. Their parallel lives exposed how a desire for power and glory can inspire great deeds, but also provoke disaster. It is most clearly on display in the formal comparisons that concluded each pair of biographies.

In men of action, he argued, some degree of anger was necessary to inspire bravery in warfare; but in a virtuous man, anger must always be tempered with calmness.

In the end, Theseus — though still some distance from realizing this ideal — was better able to curb the consequences of his rage than Romulus. Control of the passions was one of the chief objects of education. Trusting his wife, Theseus abused and cursed his son, refusing to countenance his claims of innocence.

In truth, it was Hippolytus who had been solicited by Phaedra, who, when rejected, sought her revenge. Matching one against another, conquerors and conquered are presented on an equal footing. That too was an exercise best and most effectively undertaken by the writing of history. To go further would mean confronting Augustus, and with what Greek might he be credibly paired?

Most importantly, Plutarch suggests that both Greeks and Romans can be evaluated by a single set of criteria which are unashamedly and unmistakably Greek.

It is perhaps unsurprising that in 20 out of 23 of these paired biographies, the opening life is Greek. In these Parallel Lives it is the Greek that sets the terms of inquiry for the Roman; it is Greek morality and philosophy by which the strengths and failings of individuals are to be assessed. Taken together, these biographies make a radical and arresting claim: that Roman history is to be understood most perfectly from a Greek perspective.

The empire writes back Of course, it would be too simple to think of Plutarch or Pausanias as active opponents of Roman power. Their works incited no riots; they did not inspire armed rebellion; no emperors were moved to suppress them. Indeed, in addition to effective administration, tax collection, and the maintenance of law and order, part of what marks out a ruling power long after the bloodshed of conquest and the parade of peace and prosperity restored is its ability selectively to refashion for its own ends the history of its subject peoples.

After the Roman victory, building in Jerusalem continued. The forum in the area of the much later Church of the Holy Sepulchre was dominated by a temple to Jupiter. For the previous 60 years, since the sack of the city by Roman legions in AD 70 the victory celebrated on the Arch of Titus in Rome , the Temple Mount had been abandoned. Now it was topped by two statues: one of Jupiter 73 History wars In the early 2nd century AD, Hadrian provoked a historical revolution.

This decision to obliterate Jerusalem is sometimes suggested as one of the factors that may have led to the Jewish revolt of — But it was not to last. A large Roman force commanded by Hadrian himself crushed the revolt.

Reprisals were ruthless: in one account, 50 towns and villages were destroyed and over half a million insurgents slain. The Roman Empire and one of Hadrian on horseback. Strikingly, Jews were strictly forbidden to settle in the city or its territory. Jerusalem, refounded and renamed, was closed to those for whom it was most holy. They were to be treated as permanent outsiders. That said, it would clearly be too crude to think of him as a passionate or undiscriminating promoter of all things Greek.

His spectacular benefactions to Athens and to over other cities around the Mediterranean and his liking for Greek history and literature are more than just expressions of a deeply felt phil-Hellenism. In the cities of empire the building programmes Hadrian sponsored systematically monumentalized a very particular version of the past.

In turn, through an explicit association with the emperor himself, that past was incorporated within a very Roman imperial present.

On a grand scale, and nowhere more expansively than at the Olympieion in Athens, the emperor was paired with traditional deities whose worship he could legitimately claim to have re-invigorated.