All Along the Watchtower: Roman Lusitania and its towers

Conquering Spain was hard for the Romans. They inherited an interest in it from Carthage – Hannibal had been ruling there before he attacked Italy. However, Spain – or rather Hispania – was a difficult land to conquer and harder still to rule.

The hardest part was Lusitania, much of which forms the territory of modern Portugal, plus a bulge into west central Spain. The Lusitani are recorded first in Livy in 218BC, allied to the Carthaginians. Even after the defeat and annexation of the Punic territories, they continued to resist Rome, fighting a war against the Republic in 194BC, which lasted until 179BC, when L. Postumius Albinus was awarded a triumph for defeating them. This lasted till 155BC, and a Lusitanian insurrection led by a man called Punicus, presumably a Carthaginian still living there, which reached Gibraltar, where L. Mummius, the Roman praetor, defeated them.

What brought them to Spain was metals. Tin is found only here and western Britain. Gold, solver, copper, lead, mercury and iron also abound. It has often been said that the purpose of all war is to obtain resources or prevent others from taking them. It’s quite likely that Roman interest in Britain stemmed from that too.

A few years later, the propraetor Servius Sulpicius Galba declared war on the Lusitani, then appeared to accept their surrender; they went to his base at Conistorgis (in the Algarve, north of Faro) in three sections to surrender; as each one arrived it was slaughtered. Perhaps the Lusitani were naïve – they had previously defeated and killed 7,000 Roman soldiers. One of those who escaped was Viriathus, a major hero to Portuguese and Spanish people.

A modern statue of Viriathus

Viriathus seems to have been a product of the Lusitanian elite, beginning as a shepherd (Spanish flocks have always been huge, so he may have been an ‘executive shepherd’), then joining their army and rising to leadership after the massacre of the Lusitanian elite youth commanded by Punicus in 150BC.

Viriathus ran a guerrilla campaign between 147 and 139BC to free Hispania from Roman rule. It may have been that the Romans were distracted by other fights – the Third Punic War would lead to the destruction of Carthage in 146BC, while parallel wars in Greece which began as the Fourth Macedonian War and became the Achaean War, which ended in 146BC with the destruction of Corinth in the same year. Viriathus timed his rebellion well – Roman resources were being used heavily elsewhere.

Within Spain, the Lusitanian War was sandwiched between two phases of the Numantine War and can probably be seen as part of a wider rebellion. In the Numantine war, well known people were involved, including Scipio Aemilianus, Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius Marius and Jugurtha, then on the Roman side.

This war leader was mentioned by Diodorus Siculus, a younger contemporary of Julius Caesar, by Appian and Livy. Diodorus calls him ‘lord of all’ and faithful to his word, while Livy comments on his honesty, Appian tells us of the great skill of Viriathus at warfare.

The readiness of the Lusitani to get rid of the Romans is shown by their willingness to back a Roman to do it. Quintus Sertorius, an Italian from Nursia, rebelled against Roman command in 80BC and held much of Spain against Rome until 72BC. He had earlier served in Spain as a military tribune and been awarded the Grass Crown, the rarest and highest honour in the Roman Army. On returning to Spain as a political figure for the Populares, he was rejected by the Roman leaders in Spain, who were Optimates, on the side of his enemy, Sulla, and who were robbing the Lusitanian people. The honesty and military effectiveness of Sertorius led them to hail him as their general, and join his army. He was assassinated by M. Perpena Vento, a Roman general in 72BC, upon which Pompey killed Vento to put an end to the uprising.

The Roman tower of Centum Cellae. The upper parts may be post-Classical

 The Romans may have considered they needed to keep a watch on Lusitania in particular. The great tower of Centum Cellae is dated from the first century AD. While it’s often considered a villa rustica, it is positioned on top of a hill in Portugal’s Castelo Branco district, and in the middle ages was indeed as a lookout tower for royal forces. The seven fortresses built to encircle Numantia by Scipio Aemilianus possibly formed part of a culture of constant observation.

It’s possible that we can associate the Centum Cellae with the governorship (apparently moderate, according to Suetonius) of M. Salvius Otho, the second in the Year of the Four Emperors, who was made its governor at the age of 26, a post which he held for ten years, having been banished as far west as Nero could manage, in order for Nero to take Otho’s wife Poppaea, allegedly at Poppaea’s insistence.

The Emperor Otho, who ruled for three months in AD69

 The  Caladinho watchtower and others within the Alentejo area of Portugal have been investigated in the last few years. The question is whether they form part of a system of surveillance imposed upon the people, as author Joey Williams suggests, or something else.

Excavations at the Caladinho Wtchtower

 They appear to be positioned along certain Roman roads. Williams suggests this is part of a ‘panopticon’ system, where everyone was watched in order to modify local behaviour. That is, nobody would now rebel against the Roman authorities because they could be spotted before they could achieve anything. Williams derives this idea from the design of prisons in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. The area is called a ‘contested landscape’ by Hannah Friedman in her review of Joey Williams’ book The Archaeology of Roman Surveillance in the Central Alentejo, Portugal in the American Journal of Archaeology(issue 221, January 2018)

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While Spain was a place for colonial settlement, the towers were built in the first century AD, a hundred years after the revolt of Sertorius and maybe 200 after the major uprising of Viriathus. Moreover, we should consider this within the wider settlement and exploitation of the Roman peripheral territories. Who else was watched like this? 

Britain eventually had Hadrian’s Wall, and there were limites on the Rhine and Danube frontier. But they were often nowhere near where people lived. Hadrian’s Wall was not a place of fear, but a tourist destination, as the various pieces of commemorative ware show (the Amiens skillet, etc.). This is not to say that nobody was monitored, but while there was a system of spies and informers, nowhere else seems to have been subject to a regime such as Williams proposes.

As mentioned earlier, this part of Spain is extremely rich in metals, and it may have been that the watchtowers, positioned along Roman roads, were intended to keep a protective watch on brigands, who would otherwise have put such precious cargoes at risk. Various members of the family of Pompey fled to Spain to resist Caesar, setting off further rebellions among the Cantabrians and a civil war that drew in Augustus. 

Spain seems to have thrived under Roman rule. It should never be forgotten that Trajan and Hadrian, although of Italian stock, grew up there, and Martial was certainly Spanish. It has been suggested too that Juvenal, Martial’s friend and someone who thrived under the ‘Spanish emperors’ may have been Spanish too.

Spanish Romans included the Seneca family, father, son, nephew Lucan and geographer Pomponius Mela. The poet Florus, born in Africa, lived there much of his life. Lucius Cornelius Bocchus was a Lusitanian author on natural history and one of the sources of Pliny the Elder. The agricultural author Columella, author of De Re Rustica, came from Cadiz and lived in the Julio-Claudian era, as did the rhetorician Quintilian.

Much later, Theodosius came from Spain, so his various offspring had roots there – Constantine III had to apologise after killing some of the Spanish cousins of Honorius, who were running things there. Magnus Maximus, a cousin of Theodosius, was also Spanish. The theologian and historian Paulus Orosius came from Seville, while the late Roman bishop and author of erroneous etymologies, Isidore of Seville, actually came from Cartagena. Hydatius (or Idacius), bishop of Chaves in Portugal, is the author of a fifth century chronicle of  the eventual Germanic conquest. The Christian poet Prudentius came from Saragossa.

The point of this summary is to note that Spain was not a backwater or marginalised society like Britain, but an active part of the Empire. Watchtowers along the Rhine, Danube, Maghreb and Hadrian’s Wall make sense. Internal watchtowers within Spain and Portugal make less sense, unless the primary watch was on brigands, bacaudae and general thieves, rather than subjected nations in rebellion. Hispania was a ‘normalised’ Roman society by the first century AD, when most of the watchtowers were built. Whoever built them and for whatever purposes, their use remains ambiguous.

Neither Useful Nor Honourable: the End of Roman Gaul

In AD475, four men sat in a room in Arles and destroyed the Roman Empire.

It was probably summer, and the four men were probably accompanied by others. They met with a representative of the Visigothic king, Euric, so it was very likely to have been in summer. But despite all the others in the room, they were the ones charged by the western emperor, Julius Nepos, with the negotiations he instructed them to undertake.

The four men were all bishops: Leontius was bishop of Arles, and as a friend of Pope Hilary, had established his see as the leading one of Gaul. Then there was Basilius of Aix, Graecus of Marseille and Faustus of Riez, the Briton considered the foremost Christian writer of his day. The men they met were not Visigoths by background; they were Roman officials who had changed sides to save their own hides. In Euric’s delegation, perhaps leading it, would have been Victorius, who Euric made Duke of Aquitania Prima in 479. He may have been, or been related to, another Victorius of Aquitaine, a contemporary intellectual and mathematician.

A year before, Euric’s troops had occupied Provence. Julius Nepos wanted it back. The negotiation with Euric’s men was to determine what price might be needed. They would have had in their minds the Battle of Arles in 458, in which the Visigothic king Theodoric, elder brother of Euric, had been massively defeated by the Romans under Majorian. Now Euric (who had overthrown his brother) had broken the pact (foedus) which governed de facto Visigothic rule in southern Gaul.

Euric promised the Romans could have Provence back, if he could have the Auvergne (Arvernia). The bishops agreed to this on behalf of the emperor. With Roman connivance, Euric invaded the Auvergne and took it in 475. Then he invaded Provence again and seized that in 476. The loss of Gaul was a catastrophe, and Odoacer used this to depose the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus and seize power.

Arles had become the capital of Gaul in the early fifth century, when Trier, an imperial capital a mere twenty five years earlier, was abruptly abandoned. Leontius would have had in his mind the substantial fees and earnings Arles received because of the Elisii Campi (Elysian Fields), now known as the Alyscamps. This was a highly fashionable burial ground, so popular that people were ferried across the Mediterranean from North Africa to be interred there. Even the guild of Rhone bargemen made a small fortune ferrying the dead of the empire to the must-have funeral they aspired to. They had to be stacked three deep to be accommodated there.

Around the table, next to Leontius no doubt, was Faustus of Riez. He was the leading clergyman of his day for theology. He was aged about 48 and British, and travelled back to Britain from time to time, testing the still widespread belief that his homeland was being devastated by the Anglo-Saxons. Faustus was quite probably the son of the British king we call Vortigern. The Historia Britonnum refers to St Germanus of Auxerre returning from Britain to Gaul with an illegitimate and allegedly incestuous son of Vortigern called Faustus (‘Lucky’) to make the boy a priest, and the ages match. In addition, Faustus of Riez was known as a ‘semi-Pelagian’, one holding  a modified version of the teachings of Pelagius, a Briton condemned as a heretic a generation back. Germanus had travelled to Britain to resolve a dispute between the teachings of the Church and the popular philosophy of Pelagius.

Basilius of Aix must have been a young man, because he was still bishop in AD500, when he caused to be built a spanking new cathedral, on top of the Forum, which survived for centuries until being destroyed in Saracen raids. But we can imagine the young bishop (not so uncommon, as life expectancy was quite low) thinking about how he might be able to remodel his city for the glory of God, and perhaps himself. The baptistery of Aix cathedral was built over a temple to Apollo and survives to this day. His name suggests he might have been of Greek ancestry, but there were other Greek settlements along the coast.

Graecus of Marseille sounds like he ought to be of Greek ancestry, but since Marseille was so Greek, the name holds no distinction. Perhaps it was a nickname which became his church name. He was an older man, and had a reputation as a bit of a maverick. Faustus had rebuked him harshly for espousing Nestorianism, a Christian sect that became a heresy (Ralph Mathiesen Ruricius of Limoges and Friends: A collection of letters from Visigothic Gaul, Liverpool University Press, 1999). So in that room in Arles, there would have been little love lost between Faustus and Graecus.

We should pause for a moment to consider what these four men had done: they had handed fellow Romans, who had managed to hold the Visigoths at bay, over to the enemy. They had in doing so betrayed their friend and fellow bishop, Sidonius Apollinaris. They had failed to see that Euric had already conquered Provence once, and knew how to do it again.

Once he had taken Arvernia and its capital Arvernis (formerly Augustonemetum and from the 9^th century Claremontum (now Clermont-Ferrand)), and taken Sidonius prisoner, transporting him in chains to Liviana, near Carcasso (modern Carcassonne), then to Bordeaux, putting him in prison there for some time, Euric almost surrounded Provence, enabling him to take it anyway.

Sidonius wrote letters, and eventually published nine books of them, in emulation of Pliny the Younger (all translations derived from O.M. Dalton, 1915 Loeb edition). If he imagined there would be a tenth book compiled by his admirers, that never occurred, although several people tried to engage him in writing the history of his times.

But Letter 7.7 to Graecus of Marseille is the bitter gall of a man who has been betrayed by his friends. It came after a siege of the Auvergne for four years (471-5) by the Visigoths. Clermont was his wife’s home town, but he had adopted its defence as his life’s cause.

Letter 7.7 is quietly furious at the betrayal: ‘Our enslavement is the price paid for the safety of others’ he says, adding that he now finds himself ‘amidst an unconquerable, yet alien people’ . Sidonius knew that Vercingetorix had been king of the Arveni facing Caesar and echoes Lucan’s Pharsalia in condemning ‘the servitude of the Arvernians who dared once to call themselves “brothers of Latium” and counted themselves “a people sprung from Trojan blood”’.

The sense of betrayal Sidonius expresses is keen: ‘you are the channel through which embassies come and go; to you first of all, although the emperor is absent, peace is not only reported when negotiated, but entrusted to be negotiated’ , adding later ‘you are surrounded by those most holy pontiffs, Leontius, Faustus, and Graecus; you have a middle place among them in the location of your city and in seniority, and you are the centre of their loving circle; you four are the channels through which the unfortunate treaties flow; through your hands pass the compacts and stipulations of both realms’.

Sidonius sums up his condemnation with these words: ‘You should be ashamed of this peace treaty for it is neither useful nor honourable’.

So who was Sidonius?

Sidonius Apollinaris was born  in Lyon on 5 November 430; he came from a rich family with a long history of public office. His grandfather Apollinaris was praetorian prefect of Gaul  for part of AD408, replacing a certain Limenius, but had quit in protest at the corruption of politics. In one of his letters, Sidonius talks of visiting his grandfather’s grave, which was neglected and overgrown, and mourned this; but his grandfather had been a rebel, prefect for Constantine III, so maybe somebody held a grudge.

The father of Sidonius was also Praetorian Prefect of the Gauls, as was Tonantius Ferreolus, a kinsman, related to Sidonius by blood and marriage. The father in law of Sidonius, Marcus Avitus, was Prefect in 439 and the father of Avitus, Flavius Julius Agricola, had been Prefect in 416 ­– 421. Marcus Avitus, the candidate of the Visigoths, was acclaimed emperor by their king Theodoric in Toulouse, the Visigothic capital, 455 after the assassination of Valentinian III. Sidonius wrote a panegyric to his own father in law on his elevation. He grew up and lived within the nexus of power.

With the coming of Christianity into the power structures of the Roman Empire, a new channel was opened for status and display. Bishops were elected by their parishioners and for life; decurions were expressly forbidden to enter the Church, but several time, so the law must have been quite ineffective. Constantine had given bishops the power to run courts and dispense summary justice. And while bishops were forbidden to marry, there has never been a law preventing a married man becoming a bishop. Sidonius had sons and daughters too. A middle aged bishop with grown up sons to effectively inherit episcopal power was far from unusual.

Had Avitus held the throne for any time, he might well have made Sidonius Prefect of Gaul. However Avitus, once the richest man in Gaul, was deposed as emperor, but then made Bishop of Placentia (modern Piacenza). Although that didn’t stop Avitus being murdered, it does show that becoming a bishop was an alternative route to power.

Forgiven his connection to Avitus, Sidonius rose again to become Urban Prefect of Rome, a position he had to resign from because his friend Arvandus was found guilty of treason for supporting the Visigothic king Euric. The epitaph of Sidonius, discovered recently, stresses his civic roles

noble through his titles, powerful through his office, head of the administration, magistrate at the court, quiet amid the world's billowing waves, then managing the turmoil of lawsuits, he imposed laws on the barbarian fury; for the realms that were involved in an armed conflict he restored peace by his great prudence.

His death is noted at ‘August 22, under the reign of Zeno’, as if the Roman Empire still existed at that time. By that date in AD489, there had been no western emperor for thirteen years. Note it stresses his public role, not his clerical one.

Making ex-leaders into bishops was a kind of exile. Once tonsured as priests, they could not in theory return to civilian life. Julius Nepos, once dethroned, was made Bishop of Salona, the capital of Dalmatia, the former province, which he had ruled for a long time before briefly becoming emperor. All of this can be dated back to St Ambrose, bishop of Milan, who had been the local provincial governor before that.

Sidonius also attacks (Ep.7.6, to Basilius, dated 474) the damage to the Church:

Diocese and parish lie waste without ministers. You may see the rotten roofs of churches fallen in, the doors unhinged and blocked by growing brambles. More grievous still, you may see the cattle not only lying in the half-ruined porticoes, but grazing beside altars green with weeds. And this desolation is not found in country parishes alone; even the congregations of urban churches begin to fall away.

Noting that ‘Bordeaux, Périgueux, Rodez, Limoges, Javols, Eauze, Bazas, Comminges, Auch, and many another city are all like bodies which have lost their heads through the death of their respective bishops. No successors have been appointed to fill their places’ and that ‘for every bishop snatched from our midst, the faith of a population is imperilled. I need not mention your colleagues Crocus and Simplicius, removed alike from their thrones and suffering a common exile’. He ends the letter

To you these miserable treaties are submitted, the pacts and agreements of two kingdoms pass through your hands. Do your best, as far as the royal condescension suffers you, to obtain for our bishops the right of ordination in those parts of Gaul now included within the Gothic boundaries, that if we cannot keep them by treaty for the Roman State, we may at least hold them by religion for the Roman Church.

This shows a change in perception from Rome as state to Roman as the body of the faithful. In Ireland at about the same time, St Patrick was telling the soldiers of the king of Strathclyde ‘you are not Romans but demons’, when they were never politically Romans in the first place.

Sidonius adds a comment about the successes of Euric:

I must confess that formidable as the mighty Goth may be, I dread him less as the assailant of our walls than as the subverter of our Christian laws. They say that the mere mention of the name of Catholic so embitters his countenance and heart that one might take him for the chief priest of his Arian sect rather than for the monarch of his nation. Omnipotent in arms, keen-witted, and in the full vigour of life, he yet makes this single mistake – he attributes his success in his designs and enterprises to the orthodoxy of his belief, whereas the real cause lies in mere earthly fortune.

The thinking behind this comment is that of Orosius: the victories of the enemy cannot be because God favours them, but because of simple numbers and main force. It should be noted that Arians called themselves Catholics; Sidonius is engaging in a little rhetoric here.

In a letter (Ep. 7.1, dated 474) to Mamertus, bishop of Vienne, Sidonius refers to

earthquake, shattering the outer palace walls with frequent shocks; now fire, piling mounds of glowing ash upon proud houses fallen in ruin; now, amazing spectacle! wild deer grown ominously tame, making their lairs in the very forum. You saw the city being emptied of its inhabitants, rich and poor taking to flight.

The earthquake of September 470 is recorded by Gregory of Tours, quoting the now lost Chronicle of Angers (Historiae 2.18,19). Mamertus invented Church Rogations, still practised today; by doing so, he encouraged the panicked people of Vienne to return to the city. The bishop remaining in his city seems to have been crucial to that city’s survival. If a bishop left it and settled his see elsewhere, the former see tended to collapse and the latter to survive. In addition, where no replacement bishop could be appointed after a bishop died or was exiled, there were sometimes too few bishops left to ordain another, something which Sidonius alludes to in his letter (Ep.7.5, dated 472) to Agroeclus, bishop of Sens, a famous grammarian, where he says ‘Clermont is the last of all the cities in Aquitanica Prima which the fortune of war has left to Rome; the number of provincial bishops is therefore inadequate to the election of a new prelate at Bourges, unless we have the support of the metropolitans’.

Sidonius ends Letter 7.7 with unerring bitterness:

I ask your pardon for telling you hard truths; my distress must take all colour of abuse from what I say. You think too little of the general good; when you meet in council, you are less concerned to relieve public perils than to advance private fortunes. By the long repetition of such acts you begin to be regarded as the last instead of the first among your fellow provincials.
But how long are these feats of yours to last? Our ancestors will cease to glory in the name of Rome if they have no longer descendants to bear their memory. Oh, break this infamous peace at any cost; there are pretexts enough to your hand. We are ready, if needs must, to continue the struggle and to undergo more sieges and starvations. But if we are to be betrayed, we whom force failed to conquer, we shall know beyond a doubt that a barbarous and cowardly transaction was inspired by you. … The other conquered regions have only servitude to expect; Auvergne must prepare for punishment. If you can hold out no help in our extremity, seek to obtain of Heaven by your unceasing prayers that though our liberty be doomed, our race at least may live. Provide land for the exile, prepare a ransom for the captive, make provision for the emigrant. If our own walls must offer an open breach to the enemy, let yours be never shut against your friends.

That the Auvergne was singled out for punishment does bring to mind the famous practice of the pharmakos of Marseille, where someone was singled out as a scapegoat for all society’s ills, kept apart and eventually killed. Letter 7.7 was written to Graecus of Marseille, a bishop who must have been aware of the ancient practice, and I think Sidonius is hinting at it to make Graecus squirm.

We are beginning to see a picture of former imperial officials starting to become rulers of new semi-autonomous states: Syagrius in what became Neustria, Julius Nepos in Dalmatia, Theodoric in Acquitaine, Childeric, father of Clovis, in Belgica Secunda, under the guidance of St Remigius (and portrayed in Roman uniform on his seal ring) and Sidonius in the Auvergne. As the former urban prefect of Rome, Sidonius became de facto the ruler of the Auvergne.

We should end as Sidonius ended Book 7 of his letters (Ep.7.18 to Constantius of Lyon, the author of the Vita of St Germanus of Auxerre, dated 479):

while Christ is my defender I will never suffer my judgement to be enslaved; I know as well as any one that with regard to this side of my character there are two opinions: the timid call me rash, the resolute a lover of freedom; I myself strongly feel that the man who has to hide his real opinions cuts a very abject figure.

  

Stop Quoting Laws to Us, We Carry Swords

This is a famous quote from Plutarch (Life of Pompey 10.2), admittedly written over a hundred years after it was supposedly said, and in Greek. In fact, the translation I have in front of me actually says’ Cease quoting laws to us that have swords girt about us!’ (trans. Perrin).  It was said to the so-called Mamertines of Messana (Messina) in Sicily. Since these Mamertines were descended from Latin-speaking freebooters, their laws seem to have been cobbled together out of bits of Roman law.

That might include extracts from the Twelve Tables, the earliest known Roman law code, or from a regional code – many think that Salic Law, used by the Franks in the sixth century, may just be the local law of Roman Gaul. As the Kentish Law of Aethelbehrt (c.AD595) in Old English is so very close to the Lex Longobardorum, Lombard Law, which is in Latin and unlikely to have been translated from Old English, perhaps the Kentish Law is that of Roman Britain too. If Salic Law is just local Roman-era law, then much of it was far less grand than we generally suppose.

It’s also been noted that the Breviary of Alaric, written for the Visigothic king of Southern Gaul, Alaric II (early 500s) is a cut-down version of the Theodosian Code (early 400s), suggesting it was the law current in that area of Gaul prior to Alaric.

A great deal of research has gone into the Roman legal codes, as collected several times, notably by legal historians working for Theodosius II in the eastern empire in the early fifth century and again under Justinian in the sixth (the Code codifies Roman Law, the Institutes collects important jurisprudence (legal opinion on how laws should be interpreted) and the Novels brings together Justinian’s own laws; it’s noteworthy that the  Code and Institutes are in Latin, but the Novels are in Greek.

I was going to call this piece ‘Discipline and Punish’, after the book by the late Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison), as these are major themes in the history of Rome.

Powerful people – mainly men – had two particular powers: beneficium and maleficium, literally the power to make things good or bad for others. Although Roman law had long banned debt bondage – temporary slavery until a debt was repaid – the result was clientela, in which a cliens danced daily attendance upon his patronus, who exercised patrocinium over him, in effect became a sort of father to him. It is said that a patron would often inscribe the name of his clients on a stone plaque in the atrium of his house. And since very rich men owned houses and land widely across the empire, we should assume that these were merely the clients in a single district.

The role of the paterfamilias is quite well known and the bizarre punishment set out from the late Republic for parricide – murder of one’s father – was a marker of the social disapproval of this crime. This was the poena cullei, under which the convict was sewn into a leather sack with animals and thrown into water, originally the Tiber. Originally just snakes (I say ‘just’ only in the light of what follows), under Hadrian it was extended to include a cock, a dog, a monkey and a snake; this faded until revived by Constantine (who restricted it to snakes) and later by Justinian. As the emperor was pater patriae, father of the fatherland, to conspire against him could be construed as parricide (as well as treason: maestas). It does seem that the ‘bad’ emperors of the third century may have been slightly more humane, or less inhumane, than the ‘good’ ones before and after.

The enormous power and wealth of landowners was a tiny reflection of the vast power held by emperors: the relief of the underclass from famine at Rome listed on two occasions by Augustus in his Res Gestae was only possible because he personally owned Egypt.

Nevertheless, provincial governors might extort the wealth of their province with little likelihood of being caught, or if caught, punished. Cicero, prosecuting Verres, the former governor of Sicily, said a corrupt governor must make three fortunes: one to repay the bribe he paid to get the job, one to bribe the judge at his inevitable corruption trial, and the third to live on afterwards (In Verrem 1).

The power to instigate patrocinium over clients was a means to discipline them. Claques of them would applaud and chant the name and slogan of their patron at elections and other public events. Ramsay MacMullan (Corruption and the Decline of Rome) notes this is very similar to what was going on in eastern Europe at the time he wrote. This was in 1988, and he singles out the praise given to Ceausescu, the dictator of Romania; on Christmas Day 1989, he was shot by firing squad, dead alongside the smoking ruins of the Warsaw Pact. Today, the model would be the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Within a region, local magnates (possessores and potentiores are the main terms used) could dominate all civic life. The weird behaviour of some emperors such as Gaius and Commodus seems to be a marker of how far they could push people before they rebelled.

Holders of public office often used it to enrich themselves, despite the frequent trials for excessive corruption. Musonianus, Pretorian Prefect of the East in the reign of Constantius II, was known for a love of ‘filthy lucre’. A contemporary, Theophilus, governor of Syria, was torn to pieces by citizens for extortion. Ammianus tells us how brazen some theft might be:

[Theophilus] was matched by Prosper, who was at that time still representing the cavalry commander in Gaul and held military authority there, an abject coward and, as the comic poet says, scorning artifice in thieving and plundering openly.

Meanwhile The Persians ‘kept raiding our territories with predatory bands, now fearlessly invading Armenia and sometimes Mesopotamia, while the Roman officers were occupied in gathering the spoils of those who paid them obedience’ (Ammianus XVI, 13). You can see that for many people, being ruled by the Persians was better than by Romans, because they may have been seen as less corrupt.

One of the worst cases of rapacity was that of Paul The Chain (Paulus Catena), described as a Persian by birth (Ammianus XV,3, where he is directly compared to Verres) also known as Paulus Tartareus, as of the keeper of Hell. He was sent to Britain to seize local lords who had sided with Magnentius against Constantius II (Ammianus XV,6). He piled chains on everyone and seized their assets for himself.. He then proceeded to do the same at Scythopolis, in Palestine, trumping up charges, imprisoning large numbers of people and torturing to extract money (Ammianus XIX, 12). He was so corrupt that Julian had him arrested, taken to Chalcedon in Asia Minor, tried and burnt to death (Ammianus XXII,3).

Perhaps the most vicious depiction of the kleptocracy is that of Rufinus, a Gallo-Roman sent to the Eastern Empire to be Master of the Offices to Arcadius, the elder son of Theodosius. He gets not one but two poems denouncing him by Claudian, the court poet of Stilicho I the late fourth and early fifth centuries. In Rufino (Against Rufinus, the terminology deriving from that of the law courts) I and II contain a detailed description of the way in which Rufinus stole vast sums, in the same abject and thuggish manner.

There is a term so close to patrocinium that there has to be a pun involved: ‘latrocinium’, from latro, latronis ‘thief’ can be translated as ‘a state of thiefdom’, brigandage. Neither was exactly lawful, but the master took what ever he wanted. The term is much wider than simple furtum (theft, hence ‘furtive’), theft of a thing, even real estate.

From the reign of Augustus, there was an increasing inequality in the face of the law; only plebeians could be sent to work in the mines (a delayed death penalty, since few survived that harsh regime). By the second century (the era, remember, of the ‘good’ emperors, the time in all history when Gibbon said it was happiest to be alive) the citizen body (civites) and non-citizen subjects (peregrini) had been sorted into an upper order (honestiores) and a lower (humiliores), who were awarded different penalties because of their social status. So for a particular crime, the honestior might receive a fine or banishment, but the humilior would be crucified. The honestiores comprised senators, equestrians and their families, local decurions and anyone who was a mate of the emperor. The humiliores were every other free person; slaves were ‘thinking tools’ to use Cato the Elder’s chilling phrase and could legally be killed by their master (at least in theory) and were routinely tortured for evidence in legal cases, even when only witnesses; other evidence from them was assumed to be a lie.

In the later empire, we do see evidence of people absenting themselves from imperial control. This is notable particularly in Gaul and Spain, where bacaudae (sometimes bagaudae) are known in the third to fifth centuries. They were a heterogeneous mix of thieves, army deserters, runaway slaves, people who refused to be subject to the Diocletian-era laws regarding proto-serf coloni. Others may equally have been small-time farmers and minor landowners who had fallen into an underclass.

To what extent they were organised is hard to see. The play Querolus, dating to the fifth century, has a figure who doesn’t like paying taxes, and it is suggested by his family spirit (lars familiaris) he join the ‘free men of the Loire’: ‘In that place people live by the law of nations… capital sentences are issued from an oak tree and written on bones… there all is permitted’. This sounds quite like the hundred courts of the middle ages, where local peasants met by a tree known to all; many English hundreds (subdivisions of counties) were named after trees. The Loire was in the mid-400s the border between Roman Gaul (administered by the Visigoths under a treaty (foedus)) and northern Gaul (a patchwork of local lordships); so a local near-anarchist community might thrive where nobody was quite sure who ran things; think more of Syria today. Had these various commanders had Jeeps with machine-guns  mounted on them, nobody could tell the difference. No doubt there were some Germanic people in the mix too.

In AD415/18, the Romans under Constantius III arranged the foedus mentioned above with the Visigoths under their king Wallia. Under that, the local Visigothic commander was paid a third of the tax assessment of each landowner in the area, and the rest was collected for the emperor. The local Gothic leader then accepted liability for local defence. It must have become clear to local payers that if all protection could be bought on a third of the taxes, what were the other two-thirds for? This process has been described in detail in Walter Goffart’s Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 418-584: The Techniques of Accommodation (Princeton University Press, 1997), where he famously described the treaty as ‘a good idea that got slightly out of hand’.

Tax liability and weak enforcement led to many simply abandoning land they had been allocated or which they had been tied too. There is a term agri deserti, which suggests empty land, but may just mean land for which nobody admitted tax liability; St Patrick however landed somewhere in the west of Britain (Devon or Cornwall, perhaps) and talks of walking for many days before he encountered anyone.

Despite the large body of law and a large array of courts, nothing ultimately mattered, as it was held in the third century by the jurist Ulpian that ‘whatever the emperor says is law’(Domitii Ulpiani fragmenta). Emperors held so many overlapping powers from different legal principles that it wasn’t worth disentangling them. With so little enforcement, the powerful could do anything they wanted anyway.

Local possessores lorded it over courts and, since they ran private armies, often of slaves, could seize anyone’s land and livelihood. The holding of multi-generational feuds, similar to the vendettas of modern mafiosi, were beyond the ability of an honest man to cure. Nor did the arrival of Christianity as a source of power in the fourth century improve things. It just created a new means to power: being a bishop.

Early bishops were elected by their parishioners, and Sidonius in a letter tells of the election at Bourges that he supervised, where the congregation was offered a big bribe to elect one man, but then defied him and elected a man of God (Epistulae 7, various letters). Whilst the bishop didn’t own things, he did control them, and could cream off money and goods, taking the usufruct of lands he controlled.  Although bishops were not allowed to marry, many were already married with children before they became bishops. This was true of Sidonius, who had been Urban Prefect of Rome before suddenly being made a bishop. St Ambrose is similar, having been the provincial governor based in Milan before being made bishop there by acclamation of local supporters, presumably his clients. Constantine made bishops judges, which may have speeded up the court system, but probably failed to make it more honest.

The fifth century author Priscus describes (fragment 6) meeting a man who had suffered in this way; here ‘Scythian’ means ‘Hun’ or ‘hunnish’:

As I waited and walked up and down in front of the enclosure which surrounded the house, a man, whom from his Scythian dress I took for a barbarian, came up and addressed me in Greek, with the word Xaire, "Hail!" I was surprised at a Scythian speaking Greek. … Having returned his salutation, I asked him who he was and whence he had come into a foreign land and adopted Scythian life. When he asked me why I wanted to know, I told him that his Hellenic speech had prompted my curiosity. Then he smiled and said that he was born a Greek and had gone as a merchant to Viminacium [capital of Moesia Superior, destroyed by Attila in AD441], on the Danube, where he had stayed a long time, and married a very rich wife. … He considered his new life among the Scythians better than his old life among the Romans, and the reasons he gave were as follows: ... ‘the condition of the subjects in time of peace is far more grievous than the evils of war, for the exaction of the taxes is very severe, and unprincipled men inflict injuries on others, because the laws are practically not valid against all classes. A transgressor who belongs to the wealthy classes is not punished for his injustice, while a poor man, who does not understand business, undergoes the legal penalty, that is if he does not depart this life before the trial, so long is the course of lawsuits protracted, and so much money is expended on them. The climax of the misery is to have to pay in order to obtain justice. For no one will give a court to the injured man unless he pay a sum of money to the judge and the judge's clerks’.

This piece by Priscus, from the 440s AD, sums up the massive quandary Rome faced. It had become so corrupt that people preferred to live under ‘barbarian’ rule than remain Roman.

Ovid: Exile or Not?

Two works assigned to Ovid, Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, have been taken literally to mean that he was exiled from Rome at the height of his fame. This assumes that the attribution is correct and that we know the correct order of his writings. There is no contemporary evidence of exile, nothing by either Tacitus or Suetonius in the Twelve Caesars; they both hated Tiberius; there is a minor reference in Suetonius’s Lives of the Grammarians 20 about Hyginus, who is described as an intimate friend of the poet Ovid. 

Exile was a punishment for aristocrats of rich and influential families, who could afford to fund the exiled member; Tiberius was himself exiled for a while by Augustus. Exile was not used long term and not used for non-aristocrats. If Ovid had committed a crime, the punishment would have been a fine or execution. If it had been a deep insult to Augustus or his family, the outcome would have been Ovid’s murder in a dark alley; after all, Augustus, when young, had had Cicero murdered, and there is some doubt over the death of Virgil.

 There is nothing outside the poems to suggest Ovid died in exile until the fifth century AD, rather too late to be considered credible. We don’t know if the Tristia and Pontic Epistles were written at the end of his career at all. Pontus is in Asia Minor (Pliny the Younger was its governor under Trajan), whereas Tomis is on the south bank of the Danube, hundreds of miles away.

 Books were not ‘published’ as they are today. It is hard to see how two works written by an exile could appear in Rome; there was no copyright, no marketing and no means to ensure that he, or any writer got paid. Any income would have come from subscription and patronage, neither of which were available to an exile; exile was ‘social death’. How too could exiled works be copied? The idea of Ovid as an oppositional figure published in samizdat underground editions is a modern fantasy.

 It is possible that this is a poetic fiction, and that the speaker in these poems is a persona, just as the ‘Juvenal’ who speaks in some of Juvenal’s satires is not the real Juvenal, but a mask. By that, later authors, some centuries later, thought this was a real exile. The same people tell readers that Virgil was a wizard who could create caves with beams from his eyes, and opened his works at random because they thought he was a god who could assist their problems; they also quoted his lines out of context and made centos, collage poems, out of carefully chosen lines.

 Not to labour the point too much, but we have no evidence whatsoever about the biography  of Ovid from his own times. He is mentioned by Pliny the Elder in 79AD, but what’s mentioned is a work on fishing, which is dismissed as a mistake by modern scholarship. That means the only references to him come from Seneca and Quintillian from the reign of Nero, 50 years later.  It is possible that the works of more than one author have been attributed to Ovid, maybe in the ‘Alan Smithee’ model, where works that film directors wished to remain anonymous were claimed for a fictive Alan Smithee.

Latin: New Sounds, New Letters, Same Old Problems

Latin is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. It was found at first in Latium (modern Lazio) in Italy, a region which includes Rome. Particular features of Latin suggest that it arrived before about 1200BC.

The languages closest to Latin are those of the Celtic and Germanic families. The language which became the Italic, Celtic and Germanic families arrived in Europe about 2000BC with bronze technology.

Germanic turned north and Celtic+Italic turned south. The first wave started when certain words contained a K or Q sound which was later replaced by a P. Latin and some other minor Italic languages are Q-Italic, while proto-Celtic speakers moved into Spain and later over to Ireland, probably by sea; Irish and defunct languages in Spain are termed Q-Celtic.

After the Iron Age (c.1200BC) a second wave arrived in Italy and France. By then, Q/K had become P; this can be seen in the Latin word Coquina (kitchen) which in the later arrival Oscan became Popina. Latin Quinque (five) is cognate with Welsh Pump (compare with Germanic fünf).

Latin was lucky that this was what the Roman rulers spoke. More people in Italy spoke Oscan than Latin. More people in the Roman Empire (29BC to 641AD) spoke Greek than anything else.

The Latin Alphabet

We still use the Latin alphabet. However, we have added extra letters: K was a Greek letter, only found when quoting Greek. All Cs in Latin are K sounds. J was separated from I only in the High Middle Ages so Julius Caesar was actually Iulius and Caesar was pronounced Keezer. Z is known, but mostly used for Greek words borrowed. U and V are the same character, used according to however pronunciation wanted, and W was just UU or VV. V is pronounced as W until the first century AD, when it starts to become a ‘bv’ sound and eventually a V. Y is known, but mostly in foreign words and names as an ‘eye’ . Some languages later added a character for ‘th’ such as ∂ (dropped from English in the 1400s), but Latin used ‘th’ as we do.

The emperor Claudius had a hobby horse about letters and introduced three new ones: antisigma (a C backwards plus a C, merged) to denote BS and PS), digamma inversum (an F upside down) and sonus medius, an H missing the right downstroke, a sort of schwa vowel. They ceased to be used when died, but could still be seem in the second century AD, when Suetonius notes it in inscriptions, books and official registers.

New Letters Invented by the Emperor Claudius

 The Frankish king Chilperic (r. AD561-584) also introduced four additional letters to Latin during his reign, according to Gregory of Tours. These too failed to survive his reign.

The King  also wrote books of verses following the style of Sedelius, but they were not at all compounds metric/poetic rules. He also added several letters in our alphabet, namely, ω of the Greeks, æ, the, uui, he figured in the manner as follows: ω, ψ, Ζ, Δ, and sent orders in all cities of his kingdom we should teach children in this way, and that the books were written previously erased pumiced out, and rewritten again.

The ego of kings and emperors knows no bounds.

Some characteristics of Latin

There were two types of Latin running alongside each other at the same time: Classical Latin, the speech and writing of the educated upper levels of society, and Vulgar Latin, mostly spoken and seldom written down. ‘Vulgar’ comes from ‘vulgus’, meaning a crowd (cf French ‘foule’), and does not have quite the level of disgust that the name would suggest. However, it is clear that since the elite were only a few percent of the population, a lot more people spoke the Vulgar variety.

In Classical Latin, there are two numbers: singular and plural and three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Nouns follow three major groupings and two minor ones. Noun endings (‘cases’) change according to how the word is used in a sentence.

Nominative Subject

Accusative Direct Object

Genitive    Possessive

Dative      Indirect Object

Ablative  Instrumental

Words quoted in a dictionary are shown as Nominatives. When used in poetry, as in ‘O Caesar!’, this is called the Vocative and is often identical to the Nominative. There is a minor case called the Locative, used only with place names.

Adjectives follow the case, gender and number of the noun they are connected with.

The First Declension is feminine: nouns in the Nominative end in –a and this includes all females (femina, woman; puella, girl, etc.), female names (Olivia, Julia, etc.), most country names (Italia, Britannia, etc.) and most abstract words (philosophia, eloquentia, etc.) Oddly nauta (sailor), agricola (farmer) and incola (inhabitant) are feminine, although those are not particularly female activities, as well as other seemingly random words such as mensa, table. To give an idea of the declension, here is mensa:

Nom mensa

Acc mensam

Gen mensae

Dat mensae

Abl mensa

This is not that useful to a Roman as the Genitive and Dative are identical and the Nominative and Ablative seem to be so too (in fact, from poetry we can tell the –a in the Ablative was slightly longer).  The plural is odd too:

Nom mensae

Acc mensas

Gen mensarum

Dat mensis

Abl mensis

In the singular, Genitive and Dative were the same, but in the plural the Dative and Ablative are the same. To make things worse, pronunciation guides to Latin survive, and say things like ‘Don’t forget to include the –m in the Accusative; we may not say it anymore, but you have to write it’!

The second declension comprises masculine nouns ending in –us (e.g. tribus, tribe) and –er (such as magister, master) and neuter nouns ending in –um (such as bellum, war). Endings are different from the feminine words, but follow the same pattern.

Adjectives follow the first two declensions in endings and gender. So for a man, someone might say ‘pulcher est’ (he is handsome) and for a woman ‘pulchra est’ (she is beautiful); people would use that of themselves too.

The third declension is where it all gets a bit weird, if you didn’t think it was weird already.

Third declension nouns can be either masculine or feminine and you often have to guess which. Many have a different Nominative/Vocative form to all other endings, so all are listed as two words, Nominative and Genitive (e.g. flos, floris = flower). Caesar is third declension.

Verbs take their meaning from the endings, which denote person (first, second, third) and number (singular or plural) and tense or mood. Personal pronouns do exist, but were only used for emphasis or contrast. Otherwise (as Italian and Spanish still do) they could be omitted.

In theory, in Classical Latin, words could be written in any order, because the ending would indicate the meaning. In English, John loves Jane can’t mean the same as Jane loves John because the word order determines the meaning. In Classical Latin, Julius Juliam amat means Julius loves Julia, whilst Julium Julia amat means the reverse.

In truth, few people reading a military report or a book on agriculture could abide this silly word play, so it was confined to poetry. The actual word order tended to be Nom, Dat, Acc, Abl, Verb.

There is no word for ‘the’ or ‘a/an’ in Latin (no definite or indefinite article) and no words for Yes and No; they had to use a phrase, which might be ‘sic est’ (it is so) or ‘non est’ (it is not).

The Romans were very aware of the oddities of their language, and a book De Lingua Latina (On the Latin Language) was written by a writer called Varro at the time of Augustus (29BC-14AD), trying to trace its origins and development.  A second century AD text, the Appendix of Probus (Appendix Probi) listed 227 words which were often given wrongly:

Vowel Lost	27
Vowel Changed	82
Vowel Added	2
Consonant Lost	11
Consonant Changed	42
Consonant Added	15
Word Ending Changed	29
Neologism	32

In summary, there were 111 changes to vowels (49%), 68 changes to consonants (30%), 29 grammatical changes (13%) and 32 dispreferred neologisms (14%). Essentially four-fifths of the changes were in speech and did not impact grammar or lexis. We do not know what community spoke the way Probus noted, the number of samples he took or how typical such variants were. A modern linguist would be expected to provide such metrics. But we can say that the variants in sound found acceptance in the local community or the speaker would not have been emulated and Probus would not have heard about them.

Vulgar Latin

We only get to see Vulgar Latin (VL) in chance survivals such as graffiti and in the comic phrases of lower-class characters in plays. VL used different words to Classical Latin (CL). So while CL called your head caput, capitis (whence ‘capital’), VL called it a testa, literally a pot, from which we get modern Italian testa and French tête. Likewise CL said equus (horse) but CL had caballus (nag) hence French cheval and Spanish caballo. Very often, when a modern Spanish, French or Italian word does not come from CL, it comes from VL.

Latin was at that time a living language and it does seem that many people spoke VL but wrote in CL. Some of the least VL is actually from the soldiers who wrote the Vindolanda Tablets, because they made almost no mistakes, even that pesky –m in the Accusative.

Latin had always changed. We are told by a Greek, Polybius, that in the 150s BC the Romans found an inscribed tablet about a trade treaty from 509BC, but which they were unable to read, c.350 years later.

Later Latin

From Donatus we know that the -m which ends words when they are the Direct Object of the sentence (the Accusative Case) was no longer pronounced, so that Mensa (table) was not pronounced ‘Mensam’ in the Accusative, but just ‘Mensa’. Donatus says that people should not forget to write ‘Mensam’, even if the -m is not actually spoken. Certain difficult clusters of consonants were simplified in speech, but not in writing, so for example ‘Mensa’ was actually pronounced ‘Mesa’, just as it is in Spanish today. It seems that the -us ending was weakened to an -o, so that ‘Marcus’ was actually pronounced ‘Marco’, as in modern Italian. The Emperor Constantine was therefore not ‘Constantinus’ but ‘Costantino’. In languages derived from forms of Latin, consonantal clusters are not preserved; either they are cut down, abandoned or have added vowels to make them easier to say.

After Latin

When the Roman school system collapsed in the fifth century AD, local preferences and quirks took over, the Church (a big user of Latin) started changing meanings and pronunciations. Complex sentences began to disappear. The sixth century Latin writer Gregory of Tours, who was Archbishop of that city and primate of France, comments that nobody understands a speechifier, but everyone understands a plain speaker.

By 800AD, the situation had become that everyone still wrote in Latin but spoke in something quite different. The French ruler Charlemagne had documents written for his government in ‘lingua latina rustica’ (rustic Latin), while the bulk of people spoke something that was no longer Latin, but wrote it down in Latin,

The first document to appear in writing in something that was clearly no longer Latin was the Oaths of Strasbourg (843AD). These were oaths given in front of soldiers by two kings, Charles of France and his brother Louis (Ludwig) of Germany to cooperate to fight another brother (Lothar) of the bit in-between and Italy, Charles swore in German and Louis in French, so their soldiers could understand:

Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunant, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradei salva dift in o quid il mi altresi fazet, et ab Ludher nul plaid nunquam prindrai, qui, meon vol cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit.

For the love of God and for the Christian people and for our common salvation, from this day forward so long as God gives me knowledge and power, I will help this my brother Charles both with my aid and in everything as by right one ought to help one's brother, on condition that he does the same for me, and I will not hold any court with Lothar, which, of my own will, might cause my brother Charles harm.

While it seems to have the odd Latin word (nunquam) in it, this proto-French contains many different things. ‘Romance’ as it is often called looks a bit like French and Italian, but is a long way from either and just as far from CL. The vocabulary is still rather closer to Latin than to ModFr (Deus, not Dieu, di not jour, podir not pouvoir, fradre not frère, cosa not chose, etc). Some Latin words (pro, nunquam, ab) survive unchanged in writing. Grammatically, Romance at this stage did not yet requirer je as French does today – meaning was still given through a case ending.

The important thing is that this is a supposedly accurate rendition of precisely what was spoken in front of an army of ordinary West Frankish people. It has not been glossed or dressed up, and therefore shows that Latin had changed massively to the point where a CL speaker could not have understood the vast majority of it in speech, although a CL speaker might have followed it in writing. But nor does it much resemble VL, having gone much further in the abandonment of case and the overall morphology of any variety of Latin.

In conclusion, it can be argued that CL was an artificial construct, used for specific purposes, namely oratory and literature, and hence an elite, prestige social dialect, that was used as the basis for military language, as evidenced from Vindolanda and Bu Njem (in North Africa), but which did not form the everyday speech of the vast majority of Romans, that is, those outside of elite circles. The fact is that many VL words formed the basis of later Romance languages whilst CL ones did not, or were borrowed much later from classical literature as prestige forms.