The Column of Marcus Aurelius: The Genesis and Meaning of a Roman Imperial Monument

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION I f a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.”1 This is the well-known verdict of Edward Gibbon on the condition of life in the Roman Empire between A.D. 96 and 180, a happy period of stable government, benevolent rulers, and more or less peaceful frontiers. It ended, in Gibbon’s opinion, with the death of the last of the good emperors , Marcus Aurelius. But a strong argument can be made that things had ceased being “happy and prosperous” well before the philosopher-emperor passed the throne to his delinquent son. By far the most vivid illustration of this dramatic and depressing change in the circumstances of the empire is the remarkable decoration of a monument in the heart or Rome: the Column of Marcus Aurelius. Life and Times of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Marcus Aurelius (fig. i.1) was born in a villa on the Caelian Hill in Rome in April of A.D. 121.2 He was raised by his grandfather, a holder of three consulships (a rare honor) and a relative of Hadrian. Hadrian took Marcus under his wing and eventually ordered his own chosen successor, Antoninus Pius, to adopt him. On Pius’s death in 161, Marcus became emperor; he promptly raised his adoptive brother Lucius Verus to the position of coemperor and took his adoptive father’s name. Thereafter he was known as Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. But all was not smooth: various peoples beyond the Roman frontiers seized the opportunity offered by the imperial transition to stir up trouble. Marcus and Verus were ill prepared to deal with these developing crises: neither had gained any practical military experience in their youth, and one of them—Marcus—had never even been outside of Italy.3 The most pressing problem was an invasion of the eastern provinces by the Parthians, successors to the Persian Empire and the only single power of the time capable of rivaling Rome. This attack was so threatening that the junior emperor, Verus, personally took charge of the military response— “ 2 · INTRODUCTION either because he was healthier and stronger, or because Marcus wanted his uncouth brother out of the Roman public eye. After initial setbacks, the Parthian capital of Ctesiphon was captured and its royal palace put to the torch in 165; Verus returned to Rome in 166 and the emperors celebrated a common triumph. Marcus also used the opportunity to raise his son, Commodus , to the rank of Caesar. But the war with Parthia had drawn crucial military resources away from the Danube frontier.The Germanic tribes saw this as their chance to attack, and they seized it. This touched off a long, exhausting war against various Germanic barbarians north of the Danube that occupied the last decade of Marcus’s life almost without stop. This war, which the Romans called the bellum Germanicum or, sometimes, the bellum Marcomannicum (after the largest, fiercest, and most feared of the Germanic tribes), is recorded in all FIGURE i.1. Marcus Aurelius on horseback (ancient bronze statue, Rome, Capitoline Museum). Photo by author. INTRODUCTION · 3 its violence and desperation on the Column of Marcus Aurelius. The chronology of Marcus’s Germanic wars is notoriously complex: it can only be partly reconstructed from fragmentary and scattered sources, and no more than the bare outlines are clear.4 Open conflict along the Danube frontier began just as the Parthian War ended. But a deadly plague, brought back to Italy by Roman soldiers returning from the east, devastated the army and terrified the urban population of Rome. “Many thousands” of citizens, including nobles, died, according to the fourth-century A.D. Historia Augusta, so many that their bodies had to be carried off in carts and wagons.5 This disaster delayed the imperial response to the new German threat. And when the Romans finally countered, in 168, the plague followed the emperors and the army into the field and forced them to withdraw to Italy after no more than a partial victory had been achieved. Then Verus himself died, succumbing to a stroke while riding in the imperial coach. One ancient story goes so far as to say that he was cleverly poisoned by his...