085 - Antoninus the Dutiful

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Hello and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 85, Antoninus the Dutiful. When Hadrian died in 138, there was no succession issue whatsoever. Unlike Trajan's neo-Alexandrian silence on the subject and the subsequent doubt and violence that surrounded Hadrian's rise to power, when Antoninus Aelius Caesar returned to Rome with the body of the now-dead emperor, he was welcomed with open arms by the Senate, the people, and the army. Especially the Senate. They never had been happy with Hadrian, and from the very beginning, he had been a boogeyman in their collective consciousness, with his every act, statement, or decree twisted up in their minds to prove that he was actually a dangerous psychopath. So his death was greeted with barely contained glee, glee enhanced exponentially by the fact that one of their own was taking over. Antoninus had, after all, been an amiable senator in good standing for more than twenty years before being tapped by Hadrian to become his heir. At least from the aristocratic point of view then, 138 was a banner year. The monster was dead, and a senator-senator now sat on the throne.

Every previous emperor had made their name in the legions, or because they were the blood relative of one of those men who had made their name in the legions. The only real exception was Nerva, and he had been an executive agent all the way. Antoninus was unique then, as having made his career as a senator first and foremost, and the years he would spend on the throne would prove to be the most internally harmonious in the history of the empire. For the first time in a long time, the aristocracy was fused and of one mind, the emperor and the senate thinking and acting almost as one. And unlike previous periods of senatorial ascendancy, which usually led to unrest among the general population due to the arrogance of the oligarchs, Antoninus never forgot that he was everyone's emperor, and made sure his subjects, all of them, were well taken care of.

There is a reason traditional Roman historiography has the middle of the second century marked down as the golden age of the Antonines, the zenith of an empire at the height of its power, at peace at home and abroad, happy, productive, and safe. But is this vivid image of a golden age an overblown myth? As with most golden age fantasies, probably a bit. One of the major problems we have in dealing with the age of Antoninus is the complete lack of primary sources that deal with the period. We have some fragments from Cassius Dio, who was born right around the time of Antoninus's death, and a complete, but somewhat suspect biography in the Historia Augusta. The same was basically true for Trajan and Hadrian's reigns, but with one major difference. Those guys actually, you know, did things. The architectural monuments they built, the wars they waged, the cities they founded, all now serve as a record of their lives set in stone, and historians can piece together a much richer accounting of their reigns than they can of Antoninus, who eschewed practically all of those things.

But in choosing not to partake in the glory hunting and monument building that defined his predecessors, Antoninus may have ironically done more for his reputation than had he emulated them. Because the relative lack of a record means that when we think about the man, we couple a few glowing summaries of his reign with the fact that there were no major wars or revolts or scandals, or really anything that makes historical headlines, and emerge with a portrait of an emperor who ruled over, well, a golden age. In addition to some medium-sized crises obscured over the years, which we'll get to in a bit, the shine on Antoninus's golden age is dulled somewhat by what Rome endured following his death. It is to say that the one major sustained criticism of his time in office is that Antoninus kicked a lot of cans down the road, and left it to his successors to use nine stitches where a single stitch, sewed years earlier, would have sufficed. That is not to say that he was a bad ruler, just that the warm glowing glow that surrounds his reputation needs to be turned down just a bit.

His conservative resistance to change wins him justifiable plaudits for ensuring a stable and peaceful empire while he reigned, but at the same time, it left Rome unprepared to deal with a fast-changing world after he died. Rome's great genius had always been founded on an ability to adapt quickly to circumstance, and under Antoninus, that genius atrophied. One of the first things we should note about Antoninus's reign is that it was definitely not supposed to last as long as it did. Fifty-one years old at the time of his ascension, ten years older than Hadrian had been at the time of his ascension, a reign of around a decade would have been right in line with average life expectancies, and probably what Hadrian had in mind when he plucked Antoninus's name out of the hat. As I said last time, the plan was probably to season Marcus Aurelius enough so that he would not don the purple too young, which would have left him easy prey for manipulative advisors, while simultaneously not denying the obviously talented boy's ascension for too long. But Antoninus lived, and lived, and lived, well into his seventies. Young Prince Marcus, who was supposed to become young Emperor Marcus, was forced to wait in the wings for twenty-three years, becoming instead just another middle-aged emperor. Not that there was anything wrong with that, just that if Hadrian was planning to leave Rome in the hands of some splendid youth, Antoninus's simple taste and prudent aversion to risk killed that plan dead.

The second thing we should note about the beginning of Antoninus's reign is just how quickly he gained the title Pius, which would come to be his defining cognomen. There are two competing theories about where the name comes from, but both have to do with his actions immediately following the death of Hadrian. The most common version is that when his adoptive father died, Antoninus personally escorted the body back to Rome, and then asked the Senate to deify the dead emperor. While they certainly did not hate Hadrian as much as they had Domitian, and so there was no clamor to damn his memory, the Senate had no intention of declaring the nonetheless despised Hadrian a god. The Senate was incredulous at the request, and doubly so because it was coming from Antoninus, who they considered one of their own. Surely he of all people would understand why they were refusing the request. But Antoninus, surprisingly, persisted. He told them that to refuse to deify Hadrian would stand as a repudiation of his entire reign, and thus every decision he had made along the way, up to and including his choice of heir. To repudiate Hadrian, Antoninus said, is to repudiate me. Which is fine, I will gladly lay aside the burden of empire, and leave it to you, or the army, or whoever, to decide who ought to rule. This calculated threat did the trick. Power vacuums were feared at least as much as tyrants were hated, and by forcing the Senate to face the former, they abandoned their condemnation of the latter. Hadrian was duly deified with all honors, and Antoninus' steadfast loyalty to his adoptive father, in the face of perhaps even his own doubts, was lauded throughout the empire as a supreme example of a son's duty to his father, hence the name pious, which in Latin translates as dutiful. He did not stop at the deification process either. Antoninus, piously, dutifully, completed Hadrian's as of yet unfinished mausoleum, and in 139 dedicated the new tomb, and placed Hadrian's ashes within.

The other version of the story, is that when Antoninus ascended to the throne, he cancelled death warrants, and confiscation orders, and prison sentences issued by Hadrian during his last heartless days. The grateful Senators, many of whom were caught up in this mini reign of terror, affixed their brother Antoninus with the title pious, to recognize the good work he had done, sparing them from their unjust fates. Whichever version is true, Antoninus Aelius Caesar quickly became Antoninus Pious, the name by which we know him today. The two stories are of course not mutually exclusive, and the whole package of Antoninus's loyalty to Hadrian, and the clemency he showed towards his adoptive father's enemies, could have both worked to reinforce the image of Antoninus as a just and moral ruler.

Once he had done his duty to Hadrian though, he quietly stepped out of his adoptive father's shadow and became his own man, in many ways the polar opposite of the emperor he had honored. Where Hadrian attained distinction for his traveling, for his urgent need to be everywhere at once and see for himself the empire he ruled, Antoninus is best known for not having gone anywhere. In his twenty-three years in power, he never once left Italy, a remarkable feat when you think about it. Even if they accomplished little with their presence, most emperors at least liked to visit various hotspots for the photo opportunities they presented. An exception was Vespasian, who stayed put in Rome for the most part during his decade on the throne, but he had already been all over, and had earned, as it were, his retirement in the capital. Antoninus, on the other hand, except for a brief stint as a procurator in Asia, had been an Italian homebody, and after donning the purple, saw no reason to change his ways, and perhaps felt an even greater need to stay in the capital to reinforce Rome and Italy's preeminence after Hadrian's more equalitarian views on the distinction between province and home peninsula had battered Italy's prestige.

The Italian-centric approach to governance extended beyond the basic fact that the emperor lived and ruled from the capital. As I mentioned during the episodes on Hadrian and Trajan, the Roman Empire was fast losing its Roman character. Both of the previous two emperors were provincials, and Hadrian especially had promoted elites from the provinces into the Senate and admitted them into his own circle of advisors. At first, one might think Antoninus would continue this movement, as his own family originated in Gaul, but the new emperor instead backed the old Roman elite, and when it came time to appoint proconsuls and generals and members of his governing council, he relied heavily on men of Italian origin. With the future of the empire clearly out in the provinces, the age of Antoninus then stands as the last time the emperor that had been founded and won and held by Italians was really actively run by them as well.

Antoninus was also Hadrian's opposite in administrative outlook. Where Hadrian was driven by a compulsion to improve, to reform, to rejigger, Antoninus was driven by a compulsion to protect, to entrench, and to maintain. In Antoninus' opinion, the imperial governmental apparatus he inherited worked just fine. It needed to be maintained, sure, kept free of corruption and inefficiency and all that, but there was no reason to reinvent the wheel. The only real innovation introduced during Antoninus' reign was in fact an extension of this conservatism. When he took office, he kept on most of Hadrian's staff and extended bureaucracy, itself something of a novel concept, one that sharply contrasted Hadrian's purge of so-called Trajan men. But the real shift was the extension of proconsulships, procuratorships, legionary commands, and all that, to terms of five years or more. The Roman aversion to extended terms of office was a prejudice that traced back to the founding of the Republic, and while extraordinary extensions did occur—Caesar and Gaul, for example—these were most definitely the exception rather than the rule. Antoninus, though, was temperamentally partial to continuity, and saw the constant office rotations as a bug rather than a feature of imperial administration. A procurator would spend a year in some province, and just as he was getting to know the particular challenges of the territory, he would be replaced by someone else who knew nothing about anything. It was silly, and on the frontier provinces, it was dangerous. So, for example, under Antoninus, Quintus Lolius Urbicus served as governor of Britain for five years, while Paupilius Carus Paedo served as governor of Upper Germany for nine years between 152 and 161. His praetorian prefect Marcus Gavius Maximus served an unprecedented twenty years from 138 to 158, despite persistent calls for his removal for a laundry list of sins.

This emphasis on continuity over novelty was also evident in Antoninus' attitude towards public works. Dating back to the reign of Domitian and culminating with Hadrian's empire-wide architectural orgy, Antoninus' predecessors had used extensive building projects to modernize the empire, create jobs, and leave everlasting monuments to their own greatness. Antoninus, on the other hand, more or less abandoned new construction, and focused instead on maintaining what was already existent. Because not only was he temperamentally disinclined to initiate change, but he was also temperamentally disinclined to drain the imperial treasury in a quest to build a better temple. It is a fitting monument to Antoninus, then, that the one place we do see his name inscribed over and over again are on the mile markers of the Roman highway system. Good, properly marked and maintained roads? Worthy expenditures? A mighty column or a new amphitheater? Not so much. This is not to say that building simply ceased across the empire, only that the emperor was no longer footing the bill. Local elites were leaned on heavily to defray the costs of the projects they petitioned the emperor to pay for. If they wanted new baths so badly, surely they could find the necessary cash buried somewhere on the grounds of their extravagant estates.

But if he was a bit of a miser with public funds, Antoninus was generous with his own personal fortune. An incredibly wealthy man when he ascended to the throne, Antoninus was careful to separate the imperial treasury he inherited from the personal fortune he had already accrued. The former he watched over like a hawk, and curtailed as much as he could lavish expenditures. But the latter he dispersed generously for a variety of worthy causes. So, unlike, say, Tiberius, whose reputation as a miser with the imperial accounts was not offset by personal generosity, Antoninus' reputation never suffered for his public tight-fistedness. During a particularly bad famine, he personally paid for and delivered the olive oil and grains that people could no longer afford due to shortages. When earthquakes struck or fires broke out, as they frequently did throughout the empire, Antoninus would underwrite the emergency response and rebuilding efforts out of his own pocket. He understood that the coin of the princeps had two sides—heads, executive administrator of a transnational empire, who must be careful to protect the fiscal integrity of the state, and tails, a private first citizen who must lead generously by example.

When it came to foreign policy, though, Antoninus was every bit Hadrian's disciple. Critics have described it dismissively as a policy of peace at any price. But Antoninus definitely followed Hadrian in believing it to be more accurately characterized as peace at a lower price. Legionary activity did not cease during Antoninus' reign, as we'll see in a moment, but it was only deployed in situations where it was literally unavoidable. War is an expensive undertaking in both money and manpower, and usually costs ten times as much as you thought it would going in, to say nothing of the fact that it usually took twice as long as you thought it would to win the damn thing. Having a potentially unruly tribe or neighboring kingdom as a client, on the other hand, was often not just a cheaper alternative to fighting, but also a more predictable accounting strategy.

This is where Antoninus takes the most lumps for kicking the can down the road, though, because though this policy of pseudo-bribery worked, Antoninus was loathe to extend it any further. He inherited Hadrian's long list of client kings and auxiliary tribes, and continued the financial exchanges that ensured their loyalty, but he was hesitant to add new members to the rolls. He was approached often by emissaries from various foreign tribes or nations asking for admittance into the empire proper, or status as clients, or recognition as friends of Rome. But Antoninus turned them all down, on the grounds that the empire was at its maximum defensible extent, and besides, he simply couldn't afford to take on any new clients. This worked fine during his own reign, but eventually, jealousy from those on the outs, and suspicions from those on the ins that Rome had become an extortable paper tiger, led to an explosion of violence in the north and war with Parthia in the east during the reign of Marcus Aurelius.

As I just mentioned though, it was not as if Rome was literally at peace in all places during the peace-at-any-price age of Antoninus. In Britain, a significant uprising among the Burgantes, whose territory Hadrian had bisected with his famous wall, was put down by the aforementioned Lolius Urbicus after two years of intense fighting that led the Romans to push their frontier a hundred miles north and establish a second wall, known as the Antonine Wall, around the spot where Agricola had once defeated the Caledonians. There was also on-again, off-again fighting in Africa, where Moorish nomads became emboldened and began to descend out of the Atlas Mountains to harass the province of Mauritania. The problem of the Moors would only get worse during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, and Antoninus's failure to nip the problem in the bud with more vigorous action was seen as one of the time bombs he unnecessarily handed off to his successors. In the east, there were uprisings in Egypt and the newly renamed province of Palestine that both required a military response, and along the Danube, a revolt in 158 necessitated the division of the province into two districts to effectively divide and conquer the unruly natives.

However, despite the fact that Roman military activity never ceased, even during this golden age of peace, there were no great wars of any magnitude, and Antoninus's diplomacy and bribery did the trick to keep Rome out of large-scale conflicts. In his most famous diplomatic coup, a single letter sent to the Parthian king advising that encroachment on Roman territory would not be taken lightly was enough to dissuade Parthian expansion plans. Probably the one major difference between Hadrian and Antoninus, though, when it came to their peace policy at least, was that Hadrian was fanatical about drilling and keeping the legions constantly active and alert. This state of persistent readiness left them more than ready to deal with any unavoidable conflict that might arise. Antoninus, on the other hand, who had no military experience and never once so much as ventured into a legionary camp, allowed a sense of complacency to set in that would leave Marcus Aurelius in a bit of a bind when both the Parthian empire in the east and Germanic tribes in the north exploded into Roman territory shortly after Antoninus's death.

As I mentioned, for all of these crises, the frontier battles, and the foreign diplomacy, Antoninus himself never left Rome. He ruled entirely by way of correspondence. But if we begin to form a picture of Antoninus as a sort of absentee emperor, we should correct that image immediately. He was active in all aspects of administration, and was thoroughly engaged in the welfare of the empire he ruled. Cutting a middle road between Trajan's figure it out for yourself, and Hadrian's I'll be there in a few days to tell you what to do, Antoninus and his aides poured through the incoming dispatches and did their best to advise, define, approve, and disapprove the myriad requests for instructions, aid, and funding that came in. But not content to passively react, Antoninus, especially as it related to financial matters, constantly studied the books and demanded explanations from his various provincial officials to justify their decisions and their appropriation. Corrupt officials, when discovered, were dealt with swiftly and harshly. Antoninus had no time for dishonesty or selfish misappropriation. was a sacred trust that he took very seriously.

Antoninus' concern for the welfare of his subjects, evidenced by his generous response to disasters and his intense focus on maintaining just and honest governance, extended even to a usually invisible segment of the population, slaves. Antoninus continued the trend of allowing more rights to the living engines of the Roman economy. I plan to deal more with slavery next week, but suffice it to say, following the slave revolts of the late Republic that culminated with Spartacus' war, the Roman elite began to think differently about the servants who surrounded them. The belief that slaves were so much inanimate property that could be used and abused at will gave way to a more humane attitude. During Antoninus' reign, this trend reached its logical conclusion, with the emperor codifying the idea that just as a slave had a duty to his master, a master had a duty to his slave. In some cases, a cruel master could be ordered to sell his slaves, and in all cases, the murder of a slave was now considered homicide. But again, this was the logical extension of a hundreds year long trend, and Antoninus should not be considered some human rights radical. If slavery was going to survive as an institution, as the emperor felt that it justly should, these rights needed to be extended to prevent mass uprisings. Cruel masters were a national security threat, more than they were a moral affront.

Taken as a whole, the picture we get of Antoninus is a man who wants tomorrow to be like today, and today to be like yesterday. He was conservative in his approach to practically every aspect of his public and personal life, his primary function to be the maintenance of what was already good, rather than the invention of something better. I'm going to stop there for this week, because while there are a few more things to say about Antoninus, specifically about his relationship with Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, the men who would succeed him, there is not a ton more material to cover. This however, does present us with a nice opportunity to briefly pause our story and focus a bit on everyday life in the age of the Antonines. It's been a while since I've docked the SS narrative, but with 2nd century Rome existing politically, culturally, and economically at the height of its power, it seems like a perfect time to put into port for a week or two and take a look around. Plus, Jerome Carcapino's classic Daily Life in Ancient Rome focuses specifically on this period of the empire, so it seems only natural that we should pause during Antoninus' reign to think about the bigger picture. So next week, we'll start digging into social issues and religious trends and economic activities and all the little things that define the lives and livelihoods of the millions and millions of people who lived under the Pax Romana of the five good emperors.

The last thing I'll mention is that, as a few of you have noticed, we are fast approaching the hundredth episode of The History of Rome. I know we are only on episode 85, but with the two-part and five-part shows, this is actually the 95th posted episode, and I can assure you that this is the metric I use when defining which will be the, quote, hundredth episode. To celebrate, I thought it would be fun to throw the show open to questions from the floor. So, if you're interested, go to either thehistoryofrome.typepad.com or the show's official unofficial discussion group, Forum Galorum, at forumgalorum.freeforums.org and submit your questions to the hundredth episode threads we've got set up. The questions can be about anything, Roman things, podcast things, baseball things, personal things to a point, anything really, so don't feel too constrained. Basically, if you've ever wondered about something, just go ahead and throw it out there. I probably won't be able to answer everyone, but I'll do my best to pick out representative questions that mostly cover what most people are mostly wondering about.

The only question you can't ask is where are the early episodes, because as I'm pleased to point out, they are now all available on iTunes. I'm still ironing out the bugs, so the ordering is a bit off, and it looks like iTunes is doubling up downloading episodes that you already have, which is really annoying, but going forward, all should be well and everything should stay put. For those of you who are newcomers, those early episodes can be a bit rough, both in terms of production and style, so please don't judge them too harshly. I was, after all, making it up as I went along.

The really, really last thing I'll mention is that the Forum Galorum is also now hosting a weekly History of Rome chat that launched last week and will occur regularly at noon, U.S. Central Time, on Saturdays. I should be there next weekend and periodically after that schedule permitting, so see you there.