With a bonus section on the maddest claim to the succession of the Roman Empire
The Roman Empire continues to be a big deal for people, for some reason. I studied it at school and naturally I always found it interesting – it just is. I didn’t really understand just how weird people were about it till I went to the site of the Temple of Julius Caesar and saw that people had left flowers there. Here we are, at the temple to a guy who was very much a genocidal dictator who died two thousand years ago, and people are still putting flowers down here. Two thousand years is a long time, long enough that some of those people were almost certainly descended from people killed by Caesar and, quite possibly, also descended from the people who killed Caesar. I would also wager money that some of the people who laid flowers thought that they themselves were descended from Caesar, which is the least likely of those three options although, again, given it was so long ago, it’s at least possible.
Wild though such speculation is, they certainly wouldn’t be alone in thinking of themselves as being, one way or another, descended from Rome, or a certain idea of Rome, anyway. The word ‘Caesar’ in its various forms (Kaiser (German), Tsar (Slavic), Qaysar (Arabic)) lived on as a title for just shy of two thousand years until the deposition of the last Tsar of Bulgaria in 1946 (incredibly, he’s still alive at time of writing, though of course no longer a tsar). In one of history’s small ironies, in the actual Roman Empire, Caesar meant something a bit more like modern ‘prince’, in that it denoted the heir apparent; Augustus was the main title of the emperor. Caesar himself never used Caesar as a title because it was, after all, just his name.
A king by any other name
But this determination to hang on to Roman names and titles doesn’t stop with Caesar, either the word or the man. You might already know that ’emperor’ is derived from the Latin imperator, a word which goes even further back than Caesar, to the kings of Rome. It originally meant, basically, ‘guy who gives the orders’ (think of ‘imperative’) and hence ‘military commander’, but was later tagged on to the many names and titles accrued by Caesar’s heir, Augustus, who, by general consensus, is considered the first Roman emperor. Like Caesar and Augustus, ‘Imperator’ was literally Augustus’ name, albeit an assumed one. He used it as his praenomen, equivalent to a first name, in his regnal name, which was in full ‘Imperator Caesar Augustus’.
So, all of Augustus’ names became titles upon his death or at some point afterwards. But he did also use various titles in their own right, associated with the various offices he held. These included Princeps Civitatus, ‘First Citizen’, and Princeps Senatus, ‘First of the Senate’ and hence leader of the Senate. These two titles were rolled into one, princeps, from which we derive our word ‘prince’, still very much in use as both senior royal and, in the case of Monaco, head of state. The use of princeps as a title continued for centuries, until the emperor Diocletian decided it was time to stop pretending he wasn’t a monarch. Outside of strict etymology, the concept of a leading politician as merely ‘first-among-equals’ survives today in the terms ‘premier’, ‘prime minister’ and ‘first minister’, and in numerous other political and judicial concepts. It survives, too, in the way we address the speakers of parliaments as ‘Mister’ or ‘Madam’ Speaker. George Washington was thinking of this later usage when he decided that the President of the United States should be addressed as ‘Mr/Madam President’. Even ‘First Lady/Gentleman’ as an honorary tag for the spouse of a president descends from this idea of the First Citizen of Rome.
As well as being Princeps Senatus, which gave Augustus the right to speak first in the Senate, he was also often one of the two consuls throughout his rule. Like imperator, the title of consul predated Augustus, but unlike imperator it never became the sole preserve of the emperor. It too has been revived at various points, lastly (I think), during the French Revolution. As in republican and imperial Rome, the French consulate was an office held by multiple people, but with three instead of two officers. However, this three-part rule also had its antecedent in Rome: both Julius Caesar and Augustus were part of different ‘Triumvirates’, wherein the rule of the empire was divided up between three rivals, who eventually turned on one another. As with both Roman triumvirates, the French consulate was unstable and shortly collapsed, leading to sole rule by just one of the triumvirs: Napoelon.
Like Julius Caesar, Augustus was also made pontifex maximus, the high priest of the Roman religion. This survives today as one of the titles of the Bishop of Rome, better known as the Pope. The word ‘pontiff’, used for both the Pope himself and Catholic bishops in general, derives from the same term.
Other titles granted to Augustus were tribuni plebis (tribune of the plebs, whence ‘tribune’ in modern English) and censor, both of which again survive today, although neither has ever been used for a head of state, as far as I know. Like all good (bad) revolutionary populist leaders, Caesar and Augustus stole power from the very people whose names they acted in, rendering the tribunes, originally the offices of the common plebeian classes, even more of a pointless facade than the rest of the institutions of Rome that they variously co-opted and overthrew.
A quick recap: Imperator Caesar Augustus, Princeps Civitatus, Princeps Senatus, Pontifex Maximus, Tribuni Plebis, Censor and (occasionally) Consul. That’s nine or so names and titles (counting ‘princeps’ twice). All survived him as titles. Seven survived not only the first emperor but the fall of the empire many centuries later. Only ‘Augustus’ itself has fallen away entirely as a familiar word (except in the name of the month and as a given name – not a common one in English, granted), while ‘censor’ is a familiar word with an unrelated meaning (the Roman ‘censor’ conducted the census). Of those seven surviving titles, five have been used as names of heads of state or government: emperor, kaiser/tsar/qaysar, prince and pontiff (because the Pope is the head of state of Vatican City, the world’s least nationy nation), with only consul having a long break before its brief revival. Those last two big survivors, Prince and Pontiff, are still going strong today, so that, at least as far as etymology’s concerned, we’re still living in the world Augustus built. If we count the various ‘premier/first/prime minister’-type titles, of which there are dozens around the world, then princeps has the longest legacy of them all. In fact, the only one of Augustus’ regnal names and titles which didn’t survive the empire in any major way was, ironically, the one that was of greatest importance to the Romans themselves: Augustus.
Old names for old guys
Beside the titles associated specifically with Augustus, we’ve hung on to ‘senate‘ as a legislative body made up of old guys (no longer quite exclusively, but the etymology of the word ‘senate’ is related to age, as also seen in ‘senile’; insert your own joke here). We also still have the concept of a Dictator. Dictator means the one who speaks, as in ‘my word is law’, but it would be a stretch and also just daft to relate it to the idea of a ‘Speaker’ in a legislative assembly. Julius Caesar was Dictator Perpetuo – dictator for life – but Augustus repudiated this title for himself and in fact abolished the office. Now, a cynic might say he only did this because he already was a dictator in all but name, but a cynic at the time, particularly one who didn’t want to be crucified, might just shut up. Like Augustus, modern dictators don’t tend to include ‘dictator’ as part of their titles, preferring benign sounding title like ‘Chairman‘ or ‘General Secretary‘. So even when we don’t use Roman titles, the manner in which we don’t use them is similar to the Romans.
But it’s not just etymology where we can see the influence of Rome on our political ideas. There are all those words, of course, for our senates, pontiffs, premiers and princes. Then there’s the nominal separation of powers of judges, magistrates, military leaders and priests. There’s our multiple legislative houses, (houses of commons, lords, representatives and so forth replacing the senate and the tribunes). We also rely on clever little fictions (everyone knows the King of England isn’t really the Head of the Church of England and everyone knows the US President isn’t really the head of the army). And, more symbolically still, there’s our obsession with putting eagles on flags and seals. With all of that and more, we’re still leaning heavily on Roman ideas of government and leadership.
Throughout history, by adopting these old Roman names, titles and concepts, or local variants, those various kings, politicians and pretenders were trying to say something about themselves and, quite often, the thing they were trying to say was: ‘This country is the legitimate successor to the Roman Empire and I am the legitimate successor to the Roman Emperors.’ Nowadays, we don’t tend to actually invoke the translatio imperii, the idea that some ruler or other was the successor to the Roman Empire. This is almost a shame, I think, because its one of those wonderfully mad ideas that exists with a local logic that makes no sense from the outside, like monarchy or test match cricket.
Who gets to be a Roman?
Somewhere near the top of the page, I promised to explain the maddest claims to be the successor to the Roman Empire. Unsurprisingly, it’s the English (see above, re: monarchy, test match cricket).
Like much that is strange about our country, we can blame Henry VIII for this one. As we all know, Henry VIII was desperate to father a son but struggled to beget1 one who wasn’t stillborn or illegitimate or, for all anyone knows, both. Having convinced himself that the fault lay with his wife, Catherine of Aragon, he tried to get a divorce. Naturally, to do this he had to literally send a letter to the Pope and ask for permission. Unfortunately for Henry, the Pope said no and you had to listen to the Pope because, see above, he sort of, but not really, derived his authority from Augustus, the high priest of a different, pagan religion, and who, in any case, never ruled any of England, the place Henry lived in. I did say that none of this made sense.
To try and get around the fact that Augustus’ sort-of great-great-great-etc.-successor didn’t want him to dump his wife, Henry split away from the Catholic church. This was kind of a big problem, because apart from anything else, many people at the time maintained this strange fiction that there was only one earthly power, reflecting the sole heavenly power, God. The fact that there was just obviously not just one earthly power was no impediment to this way of thinking. This is the same ‘reason’, incidentally, that centuries later Napoleon (yeah, him again) got a Pope2 to come all the way to Paris to hand him a crown. And it’s why until shockingly recently, western historians still referred to Caesar and his successors as rulers of the world3. The world is quite a big place, and it’s safe to say that Caesar didn’t rule it or even know about most of it. He didn’t even rule the biggest empire at the time, because that was China, a place Caesar had probably never heard of. Nevertheless, he doth bestride the world like a colossus.
However! To match the extremely strange views of political philosophers of the time, there were also plenty of extremely strange historians who were willing to advance still stranger theories about exactly who bestrid the world and why. According to these historians (or the English ones, anyway), Henry VIII did in fact have the right to rule England and the brand new Church of England. Did they derive this idea from some straightforward notion like sovereignty or right of conquest? Did they derive it just from the fact that there was, really quite obviously, more than one king knocking about the place?
No, they did not. They derived it from the Romans. Unfortunately for them, there was no reason whatsoever to do this. Instead, they hallucinated one.
Saint Helena was the mother of Constantine I (‘the Great’), who you may recall was the first Christian Emperor of Rome. This bit of the argument is the strongest bit of it, because it’s true. This Helena, they said, was English and the argument starts to go downhill really quite rapidly at this point because, first, England didn’t exist at the time and, secondly, she was actually Greek. Anyway, they somehow went on, because the mother of the first Christian Roman Emperor4 was British (no), that meant that the very idea of a Christian Roman Empire was also British (hang on –) and so that also means that whoever happens to be King of England now, a millennium later, inherited that right from the Romans (what?).
The reason English historians sort of got away with this kind of thing is that everyone was at it. The Holy Roman Empire (supported by the Pope), the Ottoman Empire (supported by ruling Constantinople and possessing heavy artillery), the Byzantine Emperors (till they found themselves on the receiving end of said artillery), the Trebizond empire, the Tsar of Russia, the Bulgarian empire and some distant relatives of the last Byzantine Emperor (all supported principally by themselves), each made some sort of claim to being successors of the Roman Empire. There are many more examples; these are just the claims made during Henry VIII’s lifetime.
Oh, incidentally, the problem of there being six or seven different emperors is called ‘The problem of two emperors’. Could pre-modern historians actually count? Experts suspect that no.
Who gets to be a Trojan?
At least for the English, then, the fixation with Rome was at first a matter of political convenience. And once people are obsessed with something, it tends to self-replicate: we’re kind of obsessed with the Romans because the generations before us were obsessed with them, too. Many of our contemporary ideas of what happened during the fall of the Republic are heavily influenced by William Shakespeare. He’s the reason we still use the name ‘Mark Antony’ for the man who called himself Marcus Antonius. Shakespeare wrote four plays about Rome (Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra5, and Coriolanus – more on which below) and one (Troilus and Cressida) about the Trojans, from whom the Romans, for similar mad reasons to those discussed above, thought they were descended.
So, you might say that the source of our strange idea that it’s important to establish a succession of imperial power from a distant, mythologised past was also invented… by the Romans.
And another thing…
What got me thinking about the Romans this week was watching Coriolanus, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes. Like Richard III, which I wrote about last week, it has an updated setting, which suits it quite well. Again, the performances are all excellent (Vanessa Redgrave in particular stands out as Volumnia), though no amount of acting can disguise the fact that Coriolanus is a very odd play with a deeply unsympathetic protagonist. The summary is that he hates poor people. He becomes a military hero by defeating the Volscians at Corioles, is granted the name ‘Coriolanus’ and expects to be elected consul, but is thwarted in this by the tribunes. He then goes to the same Volscians he had conquered and persuades them to march on Rome under his leadership. When he arrives at Rome, his mum comes out and points out to him that it might not be such a good idea to sack the city where his family lives and, this having apparently not previously occurred to him, he agrees to stop. When he goes back to the Volscians they, presumably annoyed at having marched all the way to Rome for nothing, murder him.
It’s all very dark and difficult. Even Frank Kermode struggled to interpret it, which tells you something about how tough it is. Probably the key oddity is that Coriolanus doesn’t much go in for soliloquies. Hamlet behaves quite oddly, but he regularly stops to tell the audience what’s going on; even when he contradicts himself, he at least tells us he’s contradicting himself. Coriolanus rarely talks to the audience and spends most of the play bellowing at the plebs. Still, even odd Shakespeare is Shakespeare. Volumnia’s big speeches are excellent and Aufidius (Gerard Butler) is compelling as a mirror of his great rival, Coriolanus. Fiennes acts the hell out of everything, as per, glaring unnervingly at everyone (I’m sure he blinks at some point but it feels as though he doesn’t) and conveying his character’s fundamental brokenness. He portrays Coriolanus as more of a machine than a human being, an absolute wreck of a man, and so succeeds in making Shakespeare’s strangest hero if not actually sympathetic, at least understandable.
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- These still being the days of begetting. ↩︎
- A different one, presumably. ↩︎
- Westerners weren’t alone in this, obviously. The Emperors of China also claimed to rule the whole world and treated ambassadors as servants of vassals, come to pay tribute. This was understood by everyone concerned to be an elaborate fiction, but they played along with it because, well, how else were they going to get at all that tea, silk and opium? ↩︎
- Just to make this even more entertaining, historians of the time also imagined that Constantine I’s dad (Constantius I) was himself a secret Christian which, if it were true, which it isn’t, would mean that Constantine the Great wasn’t the first Christian emperor. I’d say this makes the theory even more nonsensical but since none of it makes sense anyway I’m not sure it really matters. ↩︎
- These two – Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra – make a sort of loose pair, with various shared characters, most notably Antony. Obviously they’re set around the same time, too, focusing on the fall of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire. It’s from Julius Caesar that we get the image of the man – and therefore the emperors who succeeded him – bestriding the world like a colossus. ↩︎
Frank Podmore 