A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors by Anthony Blond Page B

city of Rome had achieved hegemony in Italy through force of arms (and some cunning) wielded by its volunteer citizen foot soldiers assisted by knights,
riding, without stirrups, small horses paid for out of the public purse. The Republic conquered most of the world with a professional army essentially of heavy infantrymen, and the Empire
maintained, consolidated, monitored and only slightly aggrandized those possessions which stretched from Mauretania (Morocco) to Armenia, and Thebes in Lower Egypt to Luguvallium (Carlisle). The
addition of Britain by the Emperor Claudius was expensive and would not have been approved by Augustus. In his day the Roman world contained a population of about 45 million controlled by an army
totalling, with auxiliaries, 400,000 men, who (with weapons less sophisticated than the 500,000 Americans recently in the Gulf) kept the world at peace. When the Roman soldier was not fighting
– most of the time – he was building. Nowhere is this military activity of peaceful construction better illustrated than in North Africa where Legio III Augusta (originally 100 men) was
stationed for more than a century, and where, as Sir Mortimer Wheeler once observed, the remarkable thing was that nothing remarkable happened.
    When de Gaulle wrote of the civilizing mission of the Roman army in France he cannot have meant its original and at times genocidal subjugation of Gaul under the command of Julius Caesar, who
gained a lot of his money and much of his reputation (
pace
his unchivalrous treatment of the brilliant young Vercingetorix) there. De Gaulle must have been thinking of the Roman roads, the
aqueducts (like the Pont du Gard), the temples (like the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, perhaps the most perfect building in the Western world,erected at the beginning
of the millennium in honour of Augustus’ two young grandchildren and heirs) and the almost intact amphitheatre in the same city, where I saw the Davis Cup in 1991. All these were constructed
by engineers, architects and surveyors attached to the Roman army, using Roman cement and blocks of building stone cut and joined by Roman soldiers. De Gaulle was thinking too of that system of law
and order, inspired by and imposed on their world by the Romans, so fair that it justified, in the fullest sense, their regime, whose rarely invoked sanction was the Roman army. For though the
Empire was gained by force, consensus secured it. In our period – from the accession to power of Octavian to the death of Nero – and so on for centuries, the Roman army never had to
face an equal enemy.
    ‘Delenda est Carthago’
, ‘Carthage has to be destroyed’, grim old Cato had declared, and it was. Then followed the three civil wars when Roman soldiers fought each
other. Caesar and his son-in-law Pompey joined battle and hostilities culminated in the victory of Octavian, Caesar’s great-nephew, at the naval battle of Actium against Antony and Cleopatra.
With Octavian’s change of name to Augustus, the Pax Romana, secured by the Roman soldier who swore an oath to him as ‘Imperator’ (Commander-in-Chief) on joining up and renewed his
oath annually on New Year’s Day, had begun. From this moment on, none but the Emperor could be called Imperator and none but the Emperor could be voted Triumphs. Before, popular generals were
hailed Imperator and could be voted Triumphs by the Senate. Augustus made sure that no bold general could ever again cross the Rubicon and threaten Rome. The Roman army became an army of defence,
regionally based and too static to form the basis of a military
coup.
    This potential role passed to the Praetorian Guard in Rome, created by Augustus to protect the
princeps,
but increasingly, if not ‘Emperor-makers’, a
force whose approval (usually simply secured by ‘donatives’) was a
sine qua non
of accession, legal or slightly dodgy, by successive and successful candidates for the principate
(each of whom upped the ante). The