Roman Africa: An Interpretation

Roman Africa never constituted a large part of the enormous continent of Africa. Only in Egypt did Roman control extend deep into the continent along the valley of the Nile River; elsewhere it consisted of a narrow strip of land, sometimes only a few miles in width, between the desert and the sea. At Cyrene, in present-day Libya, and at New Carthage, the city erected by the Romans in present-day Tunisia to replace the one they had destroyed, the climate permitted intensive agriculture and Roman control reached farther inland. Those places, however, were the exception.

But if Roman Africa was never an important part of Africa, it was for 500 years an important part of Rome. The history of this region of the world is vastly complex and, in some respects, still relatively unknown. This article deals with only a few isolated events and the influence of a few men, which, however, was very great and continues until the present day.

Achievements of Caesar Augustus

When Antony and Cleopatra lost the naval battle of Actium to the young Octavian, later known as Caesar Augustus, on September 2, 31 B.C.E., their fate was sealed. They escaped and returned to Alexandria, but it was only a question of time before Octavian would gather his forces and overwhelm them in Egypt. The end came in August of the next year when Cleopatra, recognizing their inevitable defeat, sent a false message to Antony that she had killed herself. He committed suicide. Later, she too died by her own hand. Her death ended the 300-year rule of the Greek Ptolemies over Egypt from their capital in Alexandria.

Octavian, now the unchallenged ruler of the Roman world, immediately set about creating a new kind of government that would, first, be (or seem to be) constitutional, and second, be both effective and enduring. The task was daunting, and perhaps no other man could have accomplished it.

The Roman Republic was in ruins, as everyone knew; it could not be revived. Most men had lost the dignified old Roman sense of moral and political responsibility; luxury and corruption had taken its place, together with a despairing fatalism that vitiated all hope for the future. Caesar Augustus gave them hope again. He established rules of conduct and had laws passed that set strict limits on behavior, both public and private; he returned formal control of legal affairs to the Senate, but gave it no real power; and he claimed no title for himself, not even that of consul, accepting no more than the role of first tribune (or representative) of the people. In time he gave up even that, calling himself only “first citizen,” or princeps, with the result that the government began to be (and was for 200 years) called a principate. These actions won him great popularity among rich and poor alike; but they did not mean that he gave up any power whatsoever. As time went on, it became very evident that he personally controlled everything and made every important decision: political, economic, even cultural. His will was the will of all, and it could almost be said of him what Dante has Piccarda say of God in The Divine Comedy: “Nella sua voluntade è nostra pace” (“In His will is our peace”).

Pax Romana

The peace established by Augustus was enjoyed by all Romans, most Italians, and many prominent citizens of the far-flung provinces of the empire—but not by all. Twice during his reign, Augustus, accompanied by great ceremony, opened the doors of the temple of Januarius, symbolizing that the nation was at peace. But on each of those occasions, without ceremony, he closed them again, and they remained closed throughout most of the next 500 years. These wars, however, were not civil strife; they were fought against peoples and tribes on the outskirts of the empire who were either rebelling against Rome or resisting being absorbed by it. Sometimes, of course, these distant conflicts, in Gaul, in Spain, in the East, and in Africa, were accompanied by terrible misery for the conquered victims. The historian Tacitus quotes a Roman officer who, aware of the suffering his men were causing, remarked: “Faciunt solitudinem et pacem appellant” (“They make a wilderness and call it peace”). But it would be merely cynical to affirm that this was always true. In no part of the empire, perhaps, was it less true than along the shore of Africa.

Egypt, in the east, was an ancient civilization that had learned how to govern itself 2,000 years before the Romans came. From Cyrene all the way to the Atlantic a narrow strip of fertile land had been inhabited by independent bands of Berbers, the aboriginal peoples of northern Africa. Over many centuries they had learned to live in diverse ways, as nomads, as hunters and gatherers, as agriculturists. But they had not learned to live with one another without the threat, and the practice, of almost constant warfare. The land was rich, or could be with irrigation; the people were energetic and could be hard working; their immemorial contacts with that other Africa south of the desert offered untold possibilities of trade and gain. For a while, two centuries before, the Carthaginians had kept the Berbers’ aggression in check, but without any real attempt to create a political society based on law. This, of course, was what the Romans knew how to do better than anybody. It was natural, therefore, that they brought law, and with law peace, and with peace prosperity to the Maghreb (stretching from present-day Libya to Morocco) during the five centuries from about 100 B.C.E. to about 400 C.E..

The Romans also founded cities, which had been rarities in Africa before their coming. There had been Carthage and a few Phoenician and Greek settlements, but the Romans had obliterated Carthage and paid little attention to the other possibilities of Africa. Now, under the Pax Romana, they paid much attention. A military career, with its promise of steady income and advancement, was a potent attraction for young Berbers. In the area south of Cyrene there was ample water for irrigation, which Roman engineers exploited, thereby helping to found a thriving agriculture; within a few decades Cyrenaica (in present-day eastern Libya) was the main source of grain for southern Italy, including the city of Rome itself. Alexandria, of course, was a world-renowned center of scholarship and literature; but it did not command a monopoly of art and learning, which spread slowly westward along the Mediterranean coastline as new cities were established, as trade and therefore wealth increased, and as perpetual peace came to be an expectation instead of an impossible dream.

Septimius Severus

Two cities of the ancient African coast deserve mention, if only because of their most famous citizens. One of these was Septimius Severus. After the assassination of Emperor Commodus in 192 C.E.., a furious power struggle ensued, with the proclamation of four different emperors in the space of a few months. Each was a general with an army faithful to him, and none had any political experience. As much by luck as by skill, Septimius Severus emerged victorious and ruled for eighteen years.

His reign coincides with the effective end of the empire as a constitutional monarchy and its beginning as a military dictatorship, which lasted until it was destroyed by the barbarians in the fifth century. This was probably not Septimius’s fault. It had been a long time since Romans had had any sense whatever of ruling themselves according to law; they had been cared for by an absolute executive bureaucracy that had left no opening for political entrepreneurism or innovation. Perhaps, too, by the time Septimius became emperor there was no longer any other way to rule the enormous, sprawling, and unruly world that was Rome. Romans had shown themselves to be brilliant innovators in law, government, and politics, but they were not up to the challenge of creating a polity like the British Empire, for instance, which endured as a workable constitutional monarchy for centuries. In any event, Septimius inaugurated a rigid, despotic tyranny that was markedly different from what had gone before.

Septimius was also the first emperor to have been born in Africa. His birth occurred in Leptis Magna, the site of which is near present-day Tripoli in Libya. Founded by the Carthaginians as early as 600 B.C.E., it was a major center for trade with the African interior. It later became the capital of Numidia, after that the seat of government of a Roman province. Already prosperous when Septimius was born there in 146 C.E.., Leptis Magna enjoyed a major resurgence as he constructed a series of magnificent buildings to honor his birthplace. Today, their ruins are among the outstanding Roman monuments remaining in the Mediterranean world.

Augustine

Edward Gibbon, in the notorious closing chapters of his great work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (first published in the pregnant year 1776), was so unguarded as to conclude that there were two causes of the decline, not just one: barbarism and religion. The association of the two terms produced much distress in his time, but there is no denying that there is at least some truth in his thesis.

Jesus of Nazareth was born about 6 B.C.E., that is, during the later years of the reign of Augustus. His disciples and followers soon began to create commotions, first in Palestine, then in Rome. The emperors, for both state and private reasons, were resolute pagans. Paganism, after all, was the official religion and many persons had an interest in keeping it that way. In addition, most of the emperors, including Augustus, were worshiped as gods of the Roman pantheon. As a consequence, for 300 years after Christ’s birth Christians experienced either persecution or contempt. But they also endured numerous episodes of internal strife based on differences of belief, many of which occasioned charges of heresy.

Africa, perhaps because of its distance from Rome, fostered a number of Christian cults as well as a striking intensity of religious beliefs. Alexandria, in particular, saw several great heresies rise and fall. Arius, for example, the founder (or instigator) of Arianism, which flourished in the fourth century, was an Alexandrian. The Donatist heresy originated in Carthage, also in the fourth century. And Egyptian Christians, who continued to speak Coptic, the final form of the ancient Egyptian language, formed their own church, which today is one of the Eastern or Orthodox Churches. Even if Africa saw the rise of heresy and schism, however, it was also the source of fanatic Christian piety and asceticism in such persons as (for just one example) St. Anthony of Egypt, the founder of Western monasticism, whose temptations by the Devil, in numerous disguises, are the subject of innumerable works of art.

Hippo Regius, another important city of the ancient African littoral that was probably founded by Carthaginians around 400 B.C.E., later became the capital of the Numidian monarchy, and was absorbed by Rome after the defeat of Carthage. Today it is the city of Annaba in Algeria. By the time its most famous citizen was born it was officially a Roman colonia, which meant that its inhabitants were Roman citizens.

Aurelius Augustinus, whom we know as Augustine, was born at Tagaste, near Hippo, on November 13, 354 C.E.., to middle-class parents who soon recognized the intellectual promise of their son and devoted all their resources to his education. At nineteen he was sent to Carthage, where he worked for ten years as a freelance tutor. While there he read Cicero, who introduced him to the seductions of philosophy, and he later became a disciple of the Manichaeans, a religious sect popular in the western empire. His Manichaean teachers proving unable to answer his hard questions, he went to Rome in search of better pupils as well as better teachers. He found neither, but he did discover the works of Plotinus, the Greek pagan Neoplatonist philosopher who opened his mind, he thought, to the belief he was seeking.

Augustine’s mother, Monica (now St. Monica in large part because she was his mother), was a devout Christian. Her husband was a pagan, and this distressed her; but a greater torture was the fact that her brilliant son, if not a pagan, was not a Christian either. She followed him to Rome and then to Milan, where he had gone to meet the famous Ambrose, bishop of that city. Augustine went to hear Ambrose preach, but, although moved, was not convinced. Monica also visited St. Ambrose and fell to her knees, pleading for him to help convert her son. Gently he raised her, blessed her, and promised: “The son of these tears shall not perish.”

As a young man Augustine had formed a relationship with a woman, said to have been “of low birth,” who bore him a son whom he called Adeonatus. (There is apparently no record of her name.) The sexual tie between the man and woman was strong, and as time went on he grew to feel that this more than anything stood between him and his elevation to a higher plane of moral and religious existence. He found it hard to break the tie and prayed, as he tells us in his Confessions, “Give me chastity, but not yet.” The unforgettable honesty of his plea was rewarded in the late summer of 386 C.E.., when, sitting in a garden in Milan, he heard some children crying out “tolle lege, tolle lege” (“Take up and read”). He thought at first that they were playing a game, but he could remember no game with those words; then he looked down at the Bible in his lap and opened it at random to these words from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Rom. 13:14). From that moment he was a Christian.

Augustine was baptized by Ambrose in the spring of 387 C.E.., whereupon he determined to return with his mother to Africa. At Ostia, near Rome, his mother fell ill, and he sat with her as she expressed her joy at his newfound freedom. He helped her as they went to the window, where both he and she had a mystical experience that is described in moving terms in the Confessions. She died shortly after, and he returned to Hippo alone. Becoming a priest, he was shortly afterward called to serve as bishop of the place. He died there on August 28, 430 C.E..; as he lay near death he heard a clamor of cries and weeping. Asking what had occurred, he was informed that the barbarians were at the gate.

For forty-three years he had served the people of Hippo as pastor, teacher, and judge; but he had served a wider pastorate as well. By the time of his death he was the best known Christian philosopher and theologian in the world, recognized not only for his writings, including especially The City of God, but also for his unremitting struggle against heresies that still afflicted the Catholic Church, despite its adoption as the official state religion by the emperor Constantine a century before. One of his last works was the so-called Rule of St. Augustine, a prescription for a Christian life that was adopted by several monastic orders and is still followed today. His influence on the culture and self-image of the West is not now as great as it once was, but for at least 1,000 years after his death he perhaps better than any other man defined the Western conception of the history and the destiny of mankind.

End of Roman Africa

The barbarians at Hippo’s gate were Vandals, a name that comes down to us as a synonym for willful destructiveness. They were a Germanic tribe that, fleeing the Huns, ranged westward into Spain and then eastward again along the African coast of the Mediterranean. Subduing Hippo and the region around it by 435 C.E.., they remained the lords of the region for a century, until they were subdued in turn by the Byzantine general Belisarius, after which they disappear from history.

The Vandals may have been vandals, but they were also Romans and Christians to boot. The problem was, they were Arians and believed that Jesus, the Son of God, was only like God and was not of one substance with God. This distinction was of great importance in the fifth century. The belief survives even today, however, for example among the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who assert that Arius was an ancestor of their founder, Charles Taze Russell.

All such distinctions became moot, at least in Africa, within a century or two after the defeat of the Vandals, when the irresistible force of Islam poured out of Arabia first into Persia and Syria, then into Egypt, and then westward across the Maghreb and then into Spain. By 700 C.E.. or a few years afterward, Muslims controlled all of North Africa; and the Roman Empire, which by that time had retreated to Byzantium, ceased to exist upon the continent.

See also Berber; Islam in Africa.

Roman Africa: An Interpretation The ancient theater at Leptis Magna (present-day Tripoli) in Libya, a city believed to have been founded by the Carthaginians as early as 600 B.C.E.

(Bridgeman Art Library International Ltd.)

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