078 - Imperial Stop Gap

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Hello and welcome to the History of Rome. Episode 78, Imperial Stopgap. The assassination of Domitian threatened to bring the Flavian dynasty full circle. Political chaos and its bosom buddies, violence, destruction, and death had brought the family to power 25 years before, and now, with no heir to speak of, the sudden murder of the emperor stood ready to open the door to another round of bitter civil war. But no one had forgotten the horrors of 68 and 69 AD, least of all the Senate, and the elites in Rome moved quickly to find someone, anyone to rally behind before the provincial general started dreaming imperial dreams.

But finding the perfect candidate would not be easy. Preferably, he would be an ally of the Flavians, so it could be plausibly argued that the new emperor did not necessarily represent a break with the previous dynasty. He should also be an older man, so that if, in their haste to find a successor, they picked a bad one, at least they would not have to live with their mistake for long. And if they could scrounge up a childless old man, that would be best of all. Everyone agreed that finding an emperor now, now, now, was the most important thing, and that unanimity was needed to make the choice stick. But unanimity now could be achieved best if every senator could imagine that his own preferred candidate would eventually be adopted by whatever old childless man they brought in now. Finally, since they had just chafed for a decade and a half under demission, it would be best if they brought in a man without strong military credentials or an independent political base. The Senate wanted back in the game, and they weren't going to get back in if they brought in someone who could just go right back to ignoring them.

All of these parameters were cross-triangulated, and the man whose name popped up was long-time imperial advisor Marcus Nerva. Past sixty, the staunch Flavian was old enough not to last too long on the throne, had no sons to pass power onto when he died, had spent his life avoiding the political limelight, and had no military record to speak of. He was the perfect stop-gap answer to the question of succession. Nerva would buy the political establishment time to work through their rivalries and alliances peacefully without needing to resort to violence. Nerva had never even hinted that he wanted the job, but he too remembered the year of the four emperors. Within hours of demission's death, he accepted the Senate's acclaim. If it meant keeping the peace, the man who had spent his life in the shadows was more than willing to step into the light.

At this point, the Senate was quite pleased with itself. They had just fired their first shot in a bid to emerge from the political wilderness, and it felt good. Since the dawn of the Principate, their role in the succession process had always been to rubber-stamp decisions that had already been made, whether by the previous emperor, the praetorian guard, or the legions in the field. For the first time, the Senate, all on its own, was choosing the man who would rule the empire. The reign of demission was unquestionably the nadir of senatorial power, and now that he was dead, they believed that they were rapidly approaching a new zenith.

In his initial pronouncements, Nerva did not disappoint on this front. He declared an end to treason trials, and promised a blanket moratorium on executions of men of senatorial rank. He freed demission's political prisoners, returned confiscated property, and recalled dozens from exile. Having undone much of demission's damage, Nerva then went further, and vowed to bring the Senate back into the political fold. They would no longer be a social club without purpose or responsibility. Nerva promised them active participation in his administration. The Senate, to say the least, was flying high.

But all was not well in the empire as a whole. The Senate had never been a good barometer of anything other than what extremely rich men in Rome thought about things. It was a sure bet that if a man was the Senate's preferred candidate, then he was going to run into difficulties elsewhere. And indeed, all the things that recommended Nerva to the Senate caused him problems everywhere else during his sixteen months in power. Being old and childless was not necessarily a problem, but his total lack of military experience and the fact that the public at large had no idea who the heck he was? Yeah, those things were going to come back to haunt him.

Political power is a zero-sum game, so while the Senate gloried in having chosen demission's successor, the two other institutions that had grown accustomed to having the final word on such matters, the Praetorian Guard and the Provincial Legions, developed quick and healthy grudges at having been left out of the process. Nerva then exacerbated the situation by letting demission's killers go free, a move that the Senate applauded, but the troops hated. When demission's loyal soldiers heard the news that the only punishment handed out was the dismissal of Secundus as Praetorian Prefect, they couldn't believe their ears. Nerva attempted to placate them with a generous donative upon ascending to the throne, issued to both the Praetorians and the rank-and-file soldiers, but it was not nearly enough to dampen their outrage. Here was some random, probably corrupt, puppet of the Senate, thinking he can just murder our Emperor and then drop a few coins around and make everything all better. Who the hell did this guy think he was? Does he even know which end of a sword to hold? For the rest of his short reign, Nerva would barely even try to exert influence over the Legions, and his relationship with the army could never be described as anything better than strained.

The new Emperor did somewhat better with the public at large, but his quest for popularity led the Empire into shaky financial territory that would only really be resolved by the sound policies of Trajan, who was a firm believer in the seize-your-neighbor's-massive-gold-and-silver-deposits-to-pay-for-everything school of economics. It wasn't that Nerva started out as some delusional tax-cut-and-spend executive, but eventually that's where his policies took him. He wanted to ease the heavy tax burden Domitian had saddled the Empire with, while simultaneously expanding social welfare programs, which, yeah, doesn't usually add up to fiscal success.

For a man who was not exactly known outside the halls of the Imperial Palace, Nerva was acutely aware of the need to generate some goodwill, and fast, and he kicked things off in fine style by announcing a one-time bonus payment of 75 denarii per citizen to celebrate his ascension to the throne. He then went further and began using Imperial money and property to extend land grants to the poor and lower middle class. Then, over the course of his first year in office, he tried to alleviate the heavy financial burdens Domitian had laid upon them all, by exempting rich and poor alike from various tax schemes Domitian had dreamed up. Everyone was starting to dig the new guy. Lower taxes and more stuff is definitely a recipe for political popularity, and Nerva was just getting started.

But the new emperor also understood that lower taxes and more stuff is not just a recipe for political success, it is also a recipe for economic disaster, and he at least tried to get some of his new programs to pay for themselves. The program closest to his heart was a new, stable welfare program for the poorest of the poor. Previous emperors had issued free grain allotments, but these programs were started and stopped at will, leaving a level of social insecurity that Nerva wanted to end for good. Plus, he figured if he could entrench his new alimentary system into the fabric of society, then his legacy would be secured. But after all the tax cutting, the treasury was running low, so Nerva decided to get into the business of issuing loans for land purchases in Italy. What does that have to do with a social welfare program? Well, in addition to encouraging greater land ownership, men who took out loans from the state were required to pay 5% interest directly back to their local municipalities, payments that would underwrite Nerva's new welfare system.

But in the end, Nerva was adding too much to the debit side of the ledger without making up for it on the credit side, and within a year, the fiscal situation looked grim. So Nerva and the Senate turned to the politician's best friend for dealing with one's own policy blunders. They formed a blue-ribbon commission to study the problem and make recommendations. But the commission turned out to be more than simply an instrument of public relations, and it actually came back with some effective ways to cut costs and raise revenues.

For one thing, they reported, Domitian had inaugurated myriad games and banquets and festivals all designed to foster public goodwill and show off the recently completed Colosseum in all its glory. He was able to pay for it all because he was taxing the dickens out of everyone, but when Nerva shut down Domitian's various revenue streams, the games became a black hole for imperial money. The commission recommended severely limiting Domitian's festival calendar down to the necessary religious observances, and Nerva immediately took their advice. The commission also noted that in addition to the mounds of bejeweled riches he hoarded in the palace, Domitian had also been in the habit of building marvelous solid gold and silver statues of himself. Does the empire really need gold statues of Domitian laying around, or do you suppose we could melt them down and put all that gold and silver to better use? Turning the old statues into coins only got the emperor so far though, so Nerva then held public auctions to purge the palace of Domitian's treasure. Finally, they raised enough money to get the empire's financial situation back on track, at least temporarily. But of course, canceling games and melting down statues are one-time only fixes, which would have been a problem for Nerva had he been in office any longer. But by the time the bill came due again, he was dead.

An economic crisis invented and resolved, Nerva breathed a sigh of relief. It is easy to feel a bit sorry for the old man. He had spent his life behind the scenes, offering advice, helping to find problems, and running small meetings. At no point had he been the man making the decisions, or the man who had to deal with the political backlash when things went awry, or the man who was expected to control the herd of cats that was the Roman Senate. For example, having promised the Senate that they were essentially exempt from political punishment, he placed no restrictions on their own pursuit of political vendettas, and the body quickly turned on itself in a maelstrom of accusations and counter-accusations over past offenses. Unwilling to come down hard on the one part of the political system who really supported him, Nerva allowed the Senate to run amok, prompting one member to observe that the tyranny of demission was perhaps superior to the anarchy of Nerva. The Emperor simply did not have a firm executive mindset, and soon everyone, friends included, came to see him as weak and ineffective. He was, at his core essence, simply unsuited for the job of Emperor.

When a coup masterminded by a Senator named Calpurnius Crassus was exposed, and Nerva refused to execute the plotters, it was not seen as a generous act of forgiveness in the mold of Julius Caesar. It was instead seen as the lame response of a weak man who refused to stand up even for himself. For the Praetorians, who had been ticked off since Nerva refused to properly punish demission's assassins, the situation was fast becoming untenable. In late 97 AD, after just over a year in office, old resentments were finally combined with enough new resentments to trigger revolt among the guardsmen. Nerva had never been their choice, and in the past year he had done nothing to show them that he was anything but a spineless puppet of the Senate. But they were not interested in hacking their Emperor to pieces, at least not yet, as he was obviously not a madman like Caligula or Nero. Actually they just wanted to remind him that the Senate may have placed him on the throne, but the Praetorians kept him there. It was important for Nerva to understand that whoever said that the pen was mightier than the sword, had clearly never been stabbed to death in the middle of the night.

So in October of 97, led by their new Prefect, Casparius Aelianus, the man appointed by Nerva to replace the dismissed Secundus, the Praetorians laid siege to the Imperial Palace, and, quickly breaching the meager non-Praetorian defenses, took the Emperor hostage. Nerva quickly gave in to their demand that Domitian's killers finally be brought to justice, and in short order, Parthenius, Secundus, and the other conspirators were hunted down and executed. The Emperor also wound up publicly thanking the Praetorians for reminding him of his duty, which was a part of the deal that sent them back to their barracks. The details of what else they wanted is hard to figure, but that was never the point. The point was to remind the Emperor who was Alpha Dog in Rome. It wasn't important what the Praetorians demanded, it was only important that the Emperor comply.

After this unsettling ordeal, Nerva knew that he needed to do something fast to salvage his decimated reputation. Not just for his own sake, but for the whole Empire. He did not have the support of the Legions, and the Praetorians had just publicly humiliated him. His only real political allies were in the Senate, and, well, nobody liked them anyway. Nerva knew that conditions like these can lead quickly to civil war if they are not headed off at the pass. Up until now, the old and childless Nerva had been coy about who he planned to name as his successor. He had been flirting with the idea of adopting as his heir the governor of Syria, but in the aftermath of the Praetorian siege, he changed course and suddenly announced to everyone's delight, the Legions most of all, that he was adopting as his heir the most popular general of the day, Trajan.

Immediately, the political waters that had been heating up to a full boil cooled. Any hint of open revolt or civil war disappeared almost overnight. The only group put out by the choice of Trajan was the Senate, as they had hoped to be in the driver's seat on the issue of succession. As I said, every Senator had their favorite candidate, and they were all getting ready for some good old fashioned horse trading to get their preferred man in place, when Nerva up and killed the game before it ever got started. In time, though, they would shed whatever resentment they had over being bypassed, as Trajan proved himself to be an emperor as great as the divine Augustus himself.

The future emperor Trajan was born in Spain in 53 AD near modern day Seville. This of course made him what no previous emperor had ever been, a provincial. Now it is a matter of some dispute whether Trajan was technically a provincial, or whether he was the member of a displaced Roman family that had moved into the region following Rome's envelopment of the Iberian Peninsula. The argument boils down to whether you believe Trajan's branch of the extended Ulpian family was pure Italian, or whether it had been native Spanish and adopted into the clan at some point in the past. Which, yeah, I'm not going to get bogged down in, since it doesn't really matter how pure Trajan's blood was when pointing out that he was the first provincial emperor, because every single citizen of the empire, Italian and provincial alike, considered him provincial. Full stop.

His family rose to prominence with the Flavians, and Trajan's father was elevated to senatorial status, following his loyal service to Vespasian and Titus during the Jewish war. The high regard Vespasian had for Trajan's father is amply demonstrated by the former's appointment in 76 AD to the governorship of Syria. Trajan accompanied his father and got his first taste of public service and military life, serving as a tribune in the Eastern Legions. Shortly after his stint in the Syrian army, young Trajan was granted a quaestorship, and his rapid rise up the Cursus Honorum was underway.

His public career well begun, Trajan then managed to marry a woman who would go down in history as one of the finest matrons in the whole long history of the empire, Pompeia Plotina. Roman writers typically cast their women either as reserved, saintly mothers in the Cornelia Africana mold, or as diabolical stepmothers in the Livia Agrippina mold. The difference in depiction, unfortunately, usually came down to how much power the woman in question wielded. If the answer was, a lot, then you can bet she was going to be portrayed as a scheming, probably murderous old witch. Pompeia Plotina, however, managed to avoid this fate, and somehow got the old historians to fit the notion of a capable and influential woman having a positive impact on the world around her into their heads, and that alone should prove what an impressive woman she actually was.

Trajan became Praetor in or around 85 AD, and shortly thereafter found himself leading the 7th Legion stationed in Spain. Trajan was a natural leader, and excelled at the art of war, and it was clear that his star was on the rise. He had the kind of easygoing authority that made men not just ready to serve, but eager to serve. He had a relaxed, familiar relationship with his troops that, coupled with his policy of strict but fair discipline, reminds you of no one so much as Julius Caesar. The young provincial general was fast becoming the most popular man in the Roman army.

Coming to the aid of Domitian so readily during Saturninus' revolt earned him Domitian's gratitude, and with his natural talents now joined with imperial favor, he was off to the races. In 91 AD, he served a term as consul, followed by key appointments as governor in Moesia and Upper Germany. As governor, he earned rave reviews not just for his military acumen, but for his administrative skills. As a provincial himself, he brought along with him none of the arrogant disdain the boys raised on the Palatine Hill seemed to carry around with them as they arrived in wherever to serve their perfunctory proconsulships.

As emperor, Trajan brought this worldview with him, fully recognizing that the empire he ruled was not a collection of faceless conquered people led by a divinely ordained elite in Rome, but rather a collection of unique and talented peoples who were all contributing to the greatness of the empire to which they belonged. It was a worldview that would serve Trajan and the Roman empire as a whole quite well.

Through the mess of Domitian's assassination and Nerva's ascension, Trajan did his best to keep his troops in line and loyal to the legal emperor. But he was not oblivious to their unhappiness with the situation, nor their whispered calls that perhaps he ought to be sitting on the throne instead of shifty old Nerva. But before he had a chance to really be persuaded that he ought to, you know, take matters into his own hand, the Praetorian Revolt made the whole question moot. Knowing full well that Trajan was the most popular man in the army, and that he needed the army on his side if he hoped to remain on the throne, Nerva suddenly announced his intention to adopt Trajan and make him his heir. Elevated to the consulship from 98 AD and given a full share of the emperor's tribunician powers, Trajan suddenly found himself not just heir, but practically co-emperor. There is some speculation that with Trajan in place and well received, that Nerva was planning to abdicate the throne, but we'll never know for sure because in January 98 AD, Nerva died of an illness at the age of 67 after just 16 months in office.

Trajan was in Germany when Nerva died, and it is traditionally reported that it was young Hadrian, future emperor himself, who delivered the news that Trajan was now the sole emperor of the Roman Empire.

Nerva's reign had been brief and stormy, and in the end we should probably be talking about the four good emperors rather than the five good emperors. But as a temporary stopgap to fend off civil war, he did just fine. His alimentary system did entrench itself as a cornerstone of the enlightened despotism that defined his successors, and whatever damage his economic flailing did was short-lived as Trajan soon solved the empire's money problems. So Nerva's personal legacy was a mixed bag that did some long-term good, but no real long-term damage. But of course, he will always be remembered as one of the five good emperors because his chosen heir turned out to be Trajan, who was consistently ranked either second or third depending on what you think of Constantine, on the list of greatest emperors of all time. So Nerva stuck the landing on the most critical decision of his reign, and for that alone we shouldn't kick him around too much.

When we come back, we'll begin the reign of Trajan, who, as I said, is widely considered one of the best emperors in Roman history. A military man at heart, he would leave Augustus' injunction against further expansion in the dust and push the empire into heretofore unconquered territory, bringing back with him riches that would fund a century of Roman brilliance. As a result of his campaigns, practically every standard map of the Roman Empire you see today is labeled down in the corner, Roman Empire at its greatest extent 117 AD, or something like that. That was Trajan. He was Rome at its greatest extent.

However, I must tell you that Trajan will have to wait until after the new year. I'm taking two weeks off for the holidays, but we'll be back on January 10 to begin the century Gibbon famously called, the period when the condition of the human race was at its happiest and most prosperous. Happy Saturnalia.