Antoninus Pius

• 1. Introduction

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  Antoninus Pius ruled Rome for twenty-three years, and by the account of the historian J. J. Wilkes, he was likely never within five hundred miles of a legion throughout that entire reign. No other emperor of the Principate could make that claim. His last word, spoken to the tribune of the night-watch who came asking for the password, was "aequanimitas" - equanimity. Then he turned over, as if going to sleep, and died. It was the 7th of March, 161. What kind of man earns that word as his epitaph? What does it mean to govern the greatest empire in the world without ever picking up a sword? And how did a cautious, frugal senator from a family rooted in the south of Gaul come to close out the longest reign since Augustus? This is the story of a man who confounded his critics by making peace look easy, and whose treasury surplus and legal reforms shaped Rome long after the Antonine plague swallowed everything he left behind.

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• 2. Roots in Gaul and Rome

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  Antoninus was born on the 19th of September, 86, near Lanuvium in Italy - modern Lanuvio - but his family's roots ran deep into the province of Gallia Narbonensis. The Aurelii Fulvi had settled in Nemausus, the city known today as Nimes. They were a relatively new senatorial family, their rise tied closely to the Flavian emperors. His paternal grandfather had supported Vespasian's bid for the imperial office and been rewarded with a suffect consulship, then an ordinary consulship under Domitian in 85. His father, Titus Aurelius Fulvus, served as consul in 89 but died shortly after, leaving no other children. Antoninus was raised by his maternal grandfather, Gnaeus Arrius Antoninus, who was reputed by contemporaries to be a man of integrity and culture and a friend of Pliny the Younger. That grandfather belonged to the Arrii Antonini, an older Italian senatorial family of considerable influence during Nerva's reign. His mother, Arria Fadilla, went on to marry Publius Julius Lupus, a suffect consul in 98, and from that union came two half-sisters, Arria Lupula and Julia Fadilla. Sometime between 110 and 115, Antoninus married Annia Galeria Faustina the Elder, the daughter of consul Marcus Annius Verus. By all accounts the marriage was a happy one. Faustina bore him four children, though both sons died before 138; their sepulchral inscriptions were found at the Mausoleum of Hadrian in Rome. A daughter, Aurelia Fadilla, died in 135. Only the youngest, Faustina the Younger, born between 125 and 130, survived to adulthood and went on to become Roman empress.

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• 3. Hadrian's Choice

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  Having served as quaestor, praetor, and then consul in 120, Antoninus caught the attention of Emperor Hadrian through diligent performance in each office. Hadrian appointed him one of four proconsuls to administer Italia, assigning him the district that included Etruria, where Antoninus already held estates. His reputation grew further during his tenure as proconsul of Asia, probably in the years 134-135. On the 25th of February, 138, after the death of his first adopted son Lucius Aelius, Hadrian formally adopted Antoninus as his son and successor. The arrangement carried a condition: Antoninus would in turn adopt Marcus Annius Verus, the son of his wife's brother, and Lucius, the son of Lucius Aelius. Both would eventually rule as the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. There seems to have been some opposition to Antoninus among potential rivals, including his former consular colleague Lucius Catilius Severus, then prefect of the city. Antoninus assumed power without opposition regardless. One of his very first acts as emperor was to argue before a reluctant Senate that Hadrian deserved divine honours. The Senate had initially refused. Antoninus pressed, and succeeded, earning the cognomen Pius - understood as reflecting pietas, or dutiful devotion. Two other explanations circulated: that he had physically supported his aging father-in-law at Senate meetings, and that he had persuaded Hadrian to spare senators the late emperor had condemned to death. Immediately after Hadrian died, Antoninus also rearranged the betrothal plans among the young heirs: Marcus's engagement to Ceionia Fabia was dissolved, and Marcus was instead betrothed to Antoninus's daughter Faustina, a match that would bind the succession more tightly to Antoninus's own line.

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• 4. Peace Without Passivity

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  Disturbances broke out in Mauretania, Judea, and among the Brigantes in Britannia during Antoninus's reign, yet none approached the scale of the crises that had preceded or would follow him. In Britain, Antoninus chose a more aggressive posture early on. In 139 he appointed Quintus Lollius Urbicus, a native of Numidia and former governor of Germania Inferior, as governor of Britannia. Under imperial instruction, Lollius invaded southern Scotland, achieved notable victories, and built the Antonine Wall from the Firth of Forth to the Firth of Clyde - 37 miles in length, shorter than Hadrian's Wall at 73 miles. The wall was gradually decommissioned in the mid-150s and eventually abandoned in the early 160s, for reasons still debated. An inscription by Legio II Augusta, which helped build the wall, shows a relief of four naked prisoners, one beheaded, suggesting the campaign involved real fighting. The orator Fronto later argued that even though Antoninus delegated the campaign's execution, the glory belonged to the emperor as the helmsman who directed the voyage. The campaign yielded Antoninus a formal imperial salutation in 142, only the second time he took the title of Imperator. Coins announced a British victory at roughly the same time. Beyond Britain, Antoninus managed frontier problems without ever leaving Italy: he sent cavalry reinforcements to Mauretania Tingitana, fortified towns including Sala and Tipasa, retained Roman suzerainty over Armenia by installing the Arsacid scion Sohaemus as client king in 140, and had the governor of Upper Germany advance the Limes Germanicus fifteen miles into the Agri Decumates. Two senators attempted usurpation during his reign - Cornelius Priscianus and Atilius Rufius Titianus, both confirmed in the Fasti Ostienses. Priscianus committed suicide; Titianus was found guilty by the Senate. In neither case did Antoninus sequester the families' properties.

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• 5. The Administrator's Hand

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  Despite an extensive building programme - roads, bridges, and aqueducts repaired or extended across the empire - Antoninus left his successors a public treasury of around 2.7 billion sesterces. Rome would not see another emperor deliver a surplus for a very long time after him. When fires struck Rome and Narbona, and when earthquakes struck Rhodes and the Province of Asia, he suspended tax collection for the affected cities. He provided financial grants to Greek cities after two serious earthquakes: one around 140 that mainly struck Rhodes and nearby islands, and a second in 152 that hit Cyzicus - destroying the huge and newly built Temple to Hadrian there - as well as Ephesus and Smyrna. Greek writers including Aelius Aristides and Pausanias praised these interventions. Ephesus occupied a special place in his esteem: he commanded that all governors of Asia should enter the province through Ephesus when taking office, and he confirmed the city's right to two temples for the imperial cult, placing it ahead of both Smyrna and Pergamon in the list of imperial honour titles. He exempted philosophers, rhetoricians, physicians, and teachers of literature from civic financial duties, confirming a Hadrianic privilege preserved in the Digest. He also created a chair for the teaching of rhetoric in Athens. His religious life was equally active: he formally incorporated the taurobolium, a bull sacrifice, into the official cult of the Great Mother, making a formerly private ritual a public one performed for the emperor's welfare. He erected a temple to Mithras in Ostia. In 148, he presided over the 900th anniversary of Rome's founding with games lasting many days, during which elephants, giraffes, tigers, rhinoceroses, crocodiles, and hippopotamuses were killed. To cover the cost, he reduced the silver purity of the denarius from 89% to 83.5%, with the actual silver weight dropping from 2.88 grams to 2.68 grams.

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• 6. Law, Slaves, and the Fiscus

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  Five chief lawyers assisted Antoninus in reforming Roman law: Lucius Fulvius Aburnius Valens, an author of legal treatises; Lucius Ulpius Marcellus, a prolific writer; and three others, the most prominent of whom was Lucius Volusius Maecianus. Maecianus had begun as a military officer before Antoninus turned him into a civil procurator. He went on to conduct the legal education of Marcus Aurelius and authored an extensive work on Fidei commissa, testamentary trusts. His reign also saw the appearance of the Institutes of Gaius, an elementary legal textbook for beginners. On slavery, Antoninus applied the principle of favor libertatis, giving the benefit of the doubt to persons whose claim to freedom was uncertain. He punished masters who killed slaves without trial and allowed proconsuls to compel the sale of slaves to another master when consistent mistreatment was demonstrated. He upheld contracts that forbade female slaves sold under such terms from being employed in prostitution. He introduced the presumption of innocence into criminal proceedings, ruled that trials and punishments must occur in the place where the crime was committed, and limited the torture of slaves - prohibiting its use on children under fourteen years of age, though with exceptions. He also restructured the imperial treasury by separating it into the fiscus, or patrimonium - the hereditary properties of the crown passed from emperor to emperor - and the res privata, the personal estate of the sitting emperor, something akin to a privy purse. The Historia Augusta records an anecdote in which Antoninus told his wife Faustina, who had complained about his frugality, "we have gained an empire and lost even what we had before" - a remark possibly reflecting his concern about his private property being absorbed by the demands of the throne.

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• 7. Rome and the Wider World

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  In 166, a group arrived at the court of Emperor Huan of Han China claiming to represent "Andun," king of Daqin - a transliteration that pointed to Antoninus. The Hou Hanshu recorded it as the first direct contact between Rome and China. Since Antoninus had died in 161 and his successor Marcus Aurelius also bore the name Antoninus, confusion has persisted about who actually sent the mission. Scholars such as Harper have suggested the group were likely merchants rather than official ambassadors, noting that many Roman traders reached India and some continued eastward. The mission arrived from the south, probably by sea, entering through the frontier province of Jiaozhi at what is now northern Vietnam. It brought rhinoceros horns, ivory, and tortoise shell, goods probably acquired in South Asia. Aurelius Victor reports that Indian, Bactrian, and Hyrcanian ambassadors also came to Antoninus, drawn by his reputation for justice and what was described as his handsome and grave appearance. Roman gold medallions from the reign of Antoninus Pius - and possibly Marcus Aurelius - have been found at Oc Eo in southern Vietnam, then part of the Kingdom of Funan. Roman coins from the reigns of Tiberius through Aurelian have turned up in Xi'an, the site of the Han capital Chang'an, though the far larger quantities of Roman coins found in India suggest the trade network for Chinese silk was centered on the subcontinent rather than on China directly. Antoninus was the last Roman emperor recognised by the Indian kingdoms, particularly the Kushan Empire; the Antonine epidemic and subsequent wars under Marcus Aurelius shifted imperial focus inward, and the far eastern relationships were increasingly set aside.

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• 8. The Long Decline and Legacy

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  In 156, Antoninus turned 70 and began to find it difficult to stay upright without physical supports. He reportedly started nibbling dry bread to sustain himself through his morning receptions. Marcus Aurelius had been created consul alongside Antoninus in 140 and given the title of Caesar, marking him as heir apparent. His administrative duties expanded again after the death, in 156 or 157, of Marcus Gavius Maximus, Antoninus's praetorian prefect for twenty years. Gavius Maximus had earned consular insignia and senatorial honours but was remembered as a stern disciplinarian, and some of his fellow equestrian procurators never forgave him. His death opened space for Lucius Volusius Maecianus to rise as the dominant adviser in the final years of the reign. In 160, Marcus and Lucius were named joint consuls for the following year, signalling the unprecedented joint succession that Hadrian's adoption chain had made possible. Two days before Antoninus died, he was at his ancestral estate at Lorium in Etruria, about twelve miles from Rome. He ate Alpine cheese at dinner with some enthusiasm, vomited in the night, and ran a fever the next day. On the following day he summoned the imperial council, handed the state and his daughter to Marcus, and gave the night-watch tribune the password that would become his epitaph. His reign, lasting from 138 to 161, closed as the longest since Augustus, surpassing Tiberius by a matter of months. That record stood for 168 years, until Constantine the Great broke it in 329. The temple Antoninus had built in the Roman Forum in 141 for the deified Faustina was rededicated jointly to both of them after his death. It survives today as the church of San Lorenzo in Miranda.

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