To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Hadrian's position as emperor was apparently far from secure. Hadrian is said to have played a personal role in the temple's design, one of many examples of his vaunted omniscience. Only Antoninus Pius' insistence that failure to deify would involve the annulling of Hadrian's acts, including his own adoption, enabled him to overcome. In 143 or 144 the young orator from Hadriani in Mysia, Aelius Aristides, delivered at Rome his famous speech in praise of the empire, which has largely contributed to the favourable verdict of posterity on the Antonine era. With Pius' death Marcus lacked only the name Augustus and the position of pontifex maximus, having held imperium and tribunician power for nearly fourteen years: there was no doubt that he was emperor. Out of respect for Pius, Marcus assumed the name Antoninus, while Lucius gave up the name Commodus, which he had borne from birth, and took instead Marcus' name M. Annius Verus.
The period of two generations following the civil wars of AD 68-9 was in many respects the zenith in the history of Roman Spain. The system of provincial government which secured the administrative framework for political, economic, social and cultural development was, on the whole, the same as that established under Augustus. The urban evolution of Roman Spain reached its zenith under the Flavian dynasty and in the early second century. More important than the number of cities which can be counted, hypothetical and incomplete as it is, are the general characteristics of the Flavian urbanization. Economic development, urbanization and social differentiation show that the Roman social order extended throughout the Iberian Peninsula. To be sure, the Antonine period saw important changes in the economic, social, political and cultural life of Roman Spain; but these had already begun under Hadrian and Antoninus Pius and were clearly internal in origin.
This chapter describes Roman Germany as the two forward zones which Augustus established on the Rhine for action against the tribes between the Weser and the Elbe. The end of the first century and the beginning of the second are characterized by the army acting as a major economic factor. The high liquidity of the soldiers was vital for the prosperity of the north-east Gallic economic zone at this time. In general the fact that Gaul was a common economic zone was emphasized by its 2.5 per cent tax collected at the border posts on the roads to Spain, Italy, Britain and Noricum, in other words right around Gaul and the Rhine provinces. During the first century all religious phenomena were conditioned by Roman/Mediterranean traditions. One can say that the period after the Batavian revolt and up to the third century is the period of Pax Romana, the great period of imperial peace, on the Rhine.
The quest for natural or moral frontiers was nothing more than a political motive for imperialism. It is in this historiographic tradition that the author begins to examine Roman frontiers, also. Greek frontiers were more cultural than physical, the divisions between measured and unmeasurable space. With the emperor Augustus, Roman concepts of space and geographic measurement took on a new dimension. After Augustus it is often argued that, apart from Roman Britain, there was no substantial territorial addition to the Roman empire in the West until Trajan's annexation of Dacia in the early second century. Although, the Romans never abandoned the ideology of expansion, yet de facto it is evident that they did stop, even if sometimes it is not easy to see exactly where. Analogies of more modern frontiers suggest that while geographic 'natural' features, such as mountains and rivers, may have political and juridical convenience, they are rarely suitable as military lines.
Formal status, more precisely the degrees of generosity in the dispensation of citizenship to the various peoples of the empire, offers only one measurement of membership in that larger city, the patria communis, that the empire pretended to be. The spread of citizenship, and of Roman-style urban communities with which citizenship was correlated, was an uneven process. The extension of citizenship and urban developments of Roman-type in the western Mediterranean was marked by considerable successes in the plains regions of the general geographic area. As with all historical portraits of the 'barbarian', the negative side of the Roman image of the foreigner was rooted in the proven inferiority of the external society. Surrounded by the twin worlds of ethnicity and rusticity were the urban centres that constituted the core of Roman society. Each town and village, depending on the wider regional and ethnic context in which it was embedded, had its own spectrum of unacceptable persons, of social outcasts.
Augustus had started the process of making Rome, as a matter of policy, a worthy capital of the world. Travelling to Rome, city of wonders in a land of wonders, was a special experience. In the world of thinking, speaking and writing, Rome was the centre too, the norm and exemplar of Antonine cities. The architecture of Rome was the greatest of its wonders. The cities of Italy in the Augustan period had functioned as channels of horizontal and vertical social mobility. In the Antonine period, moreover, there was more to economic life than landowning. The nature of production in Italy in this period constitutes one of the most problematic sets of questions in ancient economic history. In the Flavian and Trajanic period, the evidence suggests a burgeoning of the cash-crop based, villa-centred, agrarian economy which had characterized the rural landscape of large parts of Italy since the middle Republic.
Government and administration today are somewhat different concepts, the one meaning more or less policy-making, the other the implementation of government decisions. There is no such difference in Roman political thinking and vocabulary, but in the world of facts there is something not exactly similar but going in the same direction. Administration was made easier for those responsible because its aims were fairly restricted: economy and transport, culture, education and science, social relations and welfare were not targets of state intervention. Day-to-day administration was probably not very different between the various types of province. The governor's main job was always to keep the peace of the province against the ubiquitous robbers: curare, ut pacata atque quieta provincia sit quam regit. Another important job of the governor, to ensure that taxes were paid, involved deciding beforehand how many people there were and how much they had to pay.
Greece, Asia Minor and the islands came off lightly in the civil wars of 68-70. The Flavians were ready to promote urbanization and restoration. Vespasian's unification of eastern Asia Minor into the northern section of a great command imposed strains. When Trajan himself began campaigning in the East he brought it to an end. Hadrian on his travels did not neglect military matters but in Greece and even in Asia Minor, in spite of the very large number of milestones bearing his name, they were not his primary interest. The literary sources for Hadrian's tours are inadequate and honours were showered on him whether he acted in person or at some distance. But the dates of his visits to Athens as emperor are virtually certain, with the first becoming the beginning of a new era for the city: 124-5, 128-9 and 131-2. The Panhellenion is the most significant benefaction of Hadrian to Athens and the most difficult to interpret.
Archaeology has had a growing influence upon the study of Roman industry and technology in recent decades. Specialist studies of industrial products have helped to form an overall picture of industry in the early empire. Three (pottery, metal and textiles) are considered in order to provide a basis for generalizations about the nature, scale and organization of Roman industry. The processing of Roman agricultural products into wine, oil, textiles, or leather bore many similarities to, and was just as complex as, the 'industrial' production of pottery, glass, stone or metal. Terra sigillata derives from a Greek ceramic tradition which included a mixture of plain and decorated forms. The application of technology in the Roman empire is assessed in two different contexts, transport and milling, where new evidence has brought a change in perception, and in some other important aspects of Roman life: water-lifting, agriculture and architecture.
Almost the entire period between the accessions of Vespasian and Septimius Severus was dominated by military affairs in Britain. At the beginning of the period of the survey the cities of Britain were recovering from the aftermath of the Boudican rebellion. The three certainly known to have been destroyed, Colchester, London and Verulamium, have each produced evidence of slow recovery with delays in their redevelopment of a decade or more. With one or two exceptions the area where one can identify early villa development is in the south-east. Elsewhere the aristocracy, whether native or immigrant and presumed to be associated with the urban developments of the Flavian period and the second century, is much less visible architecturally in the countryside. By the end of the second century the military and civilian structures of Roman Britain were firmly established. After the decision to abandon the Antonine Wall, the frontier arrangements in the north remained essentially unchanged.
The effectiveness of the Roman army of the later first and second centuries AD was as great as it had ever been and was never to be surpassed. The legions in the later first and second centuries were essentially large bodies of highly disciplined and well-equipped infantry, trained primarily to engage the enemy in formal 'set-piece' battles. The extraordinary success of the Roman army can be ascribed to a number of factors, not least of which will have been the military qualities of the emperor and his legates and the spirit that they instilled into the men under their command so that under an emperor like Hadrian, who shared the rigours of camp life with his men, military discipline became very much the order of the day. The significance of the army to the empire and particularly to those frontier provinces in which it was based was not, however, limited to its military role, whether offensive or defensive.
On the frontiers the work of the emperors in the second century continued that of the Flavians. The unimportance of Africa as a military theatre in this period is shown by the fact that the standing army for the whole of the Maghreb never contained more than one legion, the Third Augustan Legion, which moved its base from the older part of Proconsularis to that part called Numidia. The control and organization of the tribal territories was clearly a major concern, which began with the Flavians and continued under Trajan and Hadrian. In Trajan's rule and under his successors there was more than one occasion when the corn supply to Rome needed emergency measures, as, for instance, once when Egypt's contribution failed. Production of olive oil was the most important growth area in the Roman African economy, and recent studies have radically revised older minimalist views of this boom.
Tacitus with justice describes the rise of Titus Flavius Vespasianus to the position of princeps as the work of fortune. Vespasian might appear more fortunate than Augustus in that he did not have to devise a new political system. The main lines of Flavian ideology were, however, clear from the start. Vespasian already had a military reputation behind him when he became princeps. Coins issued under Titus showed Vespasian handing over to his son the government of the world, symbolized by a globe and rudder, with the appropriate legend 'PROVIDENTIA AUGUSTI'. Titus' coins had celebrated the consecration of his father and the vote of a carpentum to his mother: on coins of Domitian it is probably she who appears as Diva Domitilla with her deified husband on the reverse. Domitian, in fact, had conferred on himself the title that most accurately conveyed the character of his rule: he was Censor Perpetuus.
The spread of Latin played an important part in changing Roman attitudes to the Gauls. The Gallic provinces were romanized by the end of the second century AD To begin with, romanization took various forms. In Narbonensis, colonization had an immediate impact, in particular by compelling dispossessed local populations to bring new areas under cultivation. The study of terra sigillata was for a long time the main means through which the economic life of Roman Gaul was studied. For a hundred years, histories of Gaul and studies of the area have concentrated on institutional and administrative developments, seeking to establish the exact boundaries of provinces and civitates, to work out precisely how they operated, and to piece together their prosopographies. Gallo-Roman sculpture ought to have been the object of great works of synthesis, or so one might think on the basis of the great number of pieces of sculpted stone which are gathered for the most part in Esperandieu's Recueil.