Does the Early Roman Principate (27 BC-AD 96) Sound Familiar? Part Two

Victor Davis Hanson

The century between AD 96–180 is perhaps analogous to our American era of 1890 to 1990 (from the Gilded Age through World War I, World War II, and the Cold War), which saw a century in which America de facto ruled the world, defeated its enemies, and achieved an unimaginable level of wealth and influence.

Gibbon based his encomium on the fact that the boundaries of the empire were finally more or less secure. The empire also operated usually by the rule of law. Its agendas of further expansion were mostly considered unnecessary. Consolidation was busy binding the far-flung empire more closely together. And there was little state-sponsored violence or civil discord at Rome itself. So Gibbon’s idea of “peace and prosperity” ruled—as a correction to the violent and decadent time of the 12 Caesars.

So, if one were to chart the Roman period most like our own economic, social, and cultural life and values in 2025, it would likely resemble this earlier era of the 12 Caesars—specifically from the death of Augustus to the passing of Domitian (i.e., AD 14–96).

There was no longer a de jure or de facto independent legislature or judiciary. The administration of the law hinged on the strength and character of the emperor. And these 80 years were the first generations when the full effects were first felt from the cumulative importation of millions of slaves, the huge profits of globalizing civilization from the Euphrates to the borders of Scotland, and from the Rhine and Danube to the Atlas Mountains. And it was an era of constant political discord, uncertainty, and violence—like our own.

One can see the cultural, social, economic, political, and military landscapes of these eight decades of violence and riches best in the novel Satyricon written by the aristocrat Petronius (ca. AD 60), the Satires of Juvenal, and the Annals and Histories of Tacitus (both of the latter two authors wrote around AD 100 of the prior eighty years). We should not forget their near contemporary Suetonius’s The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, who wrote of a longer earlier period from Julius Caesar to Domitian.

What, then, are the common themes in these biographies, histories, satires, and novels of a transitional era of huge influxes into Italy of poor slaves, huge profits, globalized trade, and international travel?

After the death of Augustus and the failure of his moral reforms but successes of his autocratic legacy, we know a great deal about life in Rome among the next 10 emperors.

One theme in all Roman literature devoted to this period is the self-criticism of the wealthy. Authors are not so much alarmed by the accustomed decadence of the ancient landed aristocratic class (who are played out and decimated by the prior Civil Wars), and whose influence and status were based for the most part on inherited land and a family dynastic name going back centuries to before the Punic Wars.

Instead, writers—again mostly aristocratic—fixate on the obnoxious nouveaux riches (often not Italian), who were far wealthier and supposedly far crasser, than the ancient Roman senatorial class. (Sort of like the Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos billionaires versus descendants from the now dethroned, worn-out aristocratic dynasties like the Kennedys, Rockefellers, Fords, Mellons, etc.). Most came from the East and south, where the big-money cities of the empire, the Silicon Valleys of the ancient world, were expanding such as Alexandria, Antioch, and New Carthage.

Trimalchio, a Middle Easterner of some sort, is caricatured in the Satyricon for his pretensions to class and education, his vast estates, his reliance on households of slaves, his crude language and personal habits, and his concentration on sex and food. He is a Jeffrey Epstein wannabe, surrounded by willing and coerced sex partners both free and slave, and seeks to name-drop his money and friends.

In the novel, Trimalchio invites over wealthy members of what was once known as the equestrian class. But they are now the self-made globalist entrepreneurs who made fortunes in everything from stone masonry and mining to shipping and rag-collecting. They brag of how their newfound riches from the new empire made the old Italian social structure largely irrelevant.

Money, not birth, now wins one prestige and acceptance.