Antonine Pious and One Stitch in Time
If someone prevents a tree from falling in the forest, you won't hear it
The reign of the Five Good Emperors is one of the classic high points of Roman history. From 96-180 AD, the empire enjoyed a remarkable run of stability and prosperity underneath some of Rome’s most famous emperors. If you have a passing familiarity with Roman history, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Trajan’s conquests, Hadrian’s Wall, and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (or at least, you remember Richard Harris’ excellent performance in Gladiator).
The high profile and fame of these three emperors, however, only sharpens the contrast with the other two members of the quintet. Frankly, Nerva (96-98) mostly gets honorary status in the group simply because he was safe and congenial enough to be every Senator’s choice for princeps after the assassination of Domitian, and because he then adopted Trajan as his heir after essentially being bullied by the Praetorian Guard and army.
This just leaves Antonine Pious (138-161) as the last of the Five Good Emperors. During the reign of Antonine Pious…nothing happened at all.
Obviously, I’m being a bit tongue in cheek. If you dig into the reign of Antonine Pious, you can find some interesting and even important details. Antonine earned his nickname by bucking his former colleagues in the Senate and insisting that Hadrian be deified, and he expanded access to clean water throughout the empire, while also leaving behind a sizable budget surplus. Antonine’s legates suppressed a minor rebellion or two, and conquered part of the Scottish lowlands, leading to the construction of the Antonine Wall (later abandoned in favor of Hadrian’s original wall). Legal historians can point to a number of important juridical reforms strengthening due process and legal protections for slaves under Antonine. In terms of personal details, the Historia Augusta (likely written several hundred years later and much less trustworthy than Seutonius, Tacitus, or Plutarch) records that, as his health was failing, Antonine Pious would nibble bread to sustain himself before holding court, and that, on the night of his death, his final word in life was to tell the palace guards that the watchword for the evening was “aequinimitas,” perfectly summing up his reign.
Still and all, there’s little here to equal the memorable status of Hadrian’s Pantheon, or Trajan’s column commemorating his conquest of Dacia. Antonine’s infrastructure projects focusing on clean water probably did more good for the empire, but I’ll bet that more people have heard that Trajan celebrated his conquest of Dacia with 123 days of games in the Coliseum, using 10,000 gladiators killing over 11,000 animals.1 Antonine Pious is decidedly one of the lesser-known Roman Emperors, and it’s very easy to pass on from hi reign very quickly. In fact, I’ve made it something of a joke in class to say, “nothing happened, moving right along.”
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This gets us back to the theme of historical mountain peaks from last time. Narratively, when you’re moving through the Roman Empire in a classroom, painful choices have to be made. You can easily spend several days covering all the highlights of Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius (to say nothing of reading and discussing Aurelius’ Meditations). As a teacher, you know you need to get a move on, and you haven’t even talked about Commodus (arguably, Gladiator toned his depravity down), the Severans, and the 3rd Century Crisis before you can get to the Late Empire and Christianity. So if a student says, “Well, what about the other emperors during the Five Good Emperors period?” Antonine Pious may unfortunately get the “nothing happened” treatment, as if there was nothing worth learning about his reign.
Except, what if there is?
Over the years, I’ve turned the “nothing happened” moment into a short riff on the nature of ruling, and how history has a built-in bias that sometimes obscures our ability to evaluate leadership and virtue.
Since history is fundamentally about narrative, it necessarily gravitates towards action and change. Stories naturally work best with conflict, resolution, and a clear outcome showing how things have changed (or at least, have returned to the starting point). Historical narratives usually begin with a problem or a new paradigm, and then cast backwards in order to tell the story of how the problem was solved or the new paradigm arose. An event which disrupts an existing equilibrium, or a figure working towards a clear goal or vision naturally attracts our attention.
This is similar to the reason why fairy tales always end with “and they lived happily ever after.” Because while that ending is wonderful for the prince and princess, it’s boring for the audience (this is why sequel stories so often have to introduce conflict which retroactively ruins the happy ending of the original story). The story of a thousand-year golden age is actually told very quickly; it’s just an endless repetition of good things over and over again.
So our historical narratives have a default preference towards action and solving problems. “Great” figures such as Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon naturally get more attention, and it's easier to point to battles, transformative laws, and great works of architecture as the story of history. Even modern democratic historical narratives that shift the focus away from Great Man history still focus on change, conflict and resolution, just substituting entire peoples and cultures for individual rulers.
This means that figures like Aristides the Just, Antonine Pious, or Calvin Coolidge will get short shrift, as “nothing happened” leaders (one might throw in medieval kings who accomplished little, but were known for their piety, such as Edward the Confessor). Sometimes, it may really be that these were weak rulers who did little, or even sowed the seeds of future crises by their inactivity. But other times, a good reign with few problems might just as easily denote genuine skill, good management, and attention to detail, thereby preventing problems from arising in the first place. Many great artists make their craft look easy from the outside, especially to a non-skilled layman. A well-run institution with few problems or active crises probably speaks to layers of good organization and management. The ancient Greeks equated perfection with stillness and completion, since there would be no need for change or potentiality. From the outside, the best leader in the world would probably appear to be doing very little, so it’s possible that the greatest king in all of history was a relative non-entity who ruled for five decades while using prudence and good judgment to head off problems and snuff out fires before they could grow to attract the attention of later historians. The default impulse when writing history is to ask why something happened, and not why something didn’t happen. Your grandmother used to say that “a stitch in time saves nine,” but popular histories are more likely to turn the nine stitches into a grand narrative.
Of course, when a period of chaos and instability is so great that it becomes the new paradigm, then solving that problem becomes its own story, such as Diocletian ending the 3rd Century Crisis. Also, detailed historical narratives from professional historians frequently dig deeper into the geological layers of history, helping show how successful paradigms were sustained and maintained. Cyrus the Great is famous for founding the Persian Empire, while his successor Darius was supposedly derided by his own subjects as “the shopkeeper,” since he merely minded the empire that Cyrus had built for him.2 But to a modern historian interested in how the Persian empire lasted successfully for so long, Darius’ institution-building, setting up the Satrap-system, regular tribute from the provinces, professionalizing the government with a bureaucracy, etc., may be even more consequential than Cyrus’ conquests (great conquerors are rare, but great institution-builders even rarer).
So, digging mineshafts into historical mountains and looking for hidden problems that were solved or nipped in the bud can help us find overlooked figures or solutions to problems, and that’s very useful. But of course, there are limits to this; we can’t dig deeply everywhere, and we’ll still have to survey mountain peaks most of the time. For my students, Antonine Pious’ very lack of attention will hopefully be a cautionary tale.
But also, even detailed mineshafts can recreate the same problem of a bias towards action and problem-solving, just at a smaller scale, and in ways that experts aren’t immune to. While I’m not a professional historian and don’t work in academia, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the “publish or perish'' woes of academics chasing a declining number of tenure-track positions incentivizes historians to constantly find new things to be revisionist about, and new things to “problematize.” I have a hunch that at least some of the clickbait-outrage stories about academics making controversial claims is due to structural problems within academia, and not just radical politics. Only established historians representing the reigning orthodox interpretation will want to say that all the problems in a field have been solved and need no further questioning.
Instead, I would like to advance the claim that the nature of historical narrative, especially at the more general and popular level, creates a default-bias away from highlighting certain types of virtue, especially those which appear more passive from the outside. Aristotle elevated the contemplative man over the man of action, but the man of action will naturally tend to attract attention, even as wise old philosophers and mentor-figures (often depicted with calm equanimity in the face of a young hero’s wild exertions) are often more deeply admired by those who know them.
This should become an a priori assumption for us about the historical record, and likely the world today; there is more virtue and skill at work in the world than we think. This is a corollary to the “if it bleeds it leads” phenomenon in journalism, where bad news, conflict, and outrage sell better than good news.
More detailed narratives can help correct this bias, but we can’t study everything as closely as we’d like. This means that there are almost always going to be figures like Aristides the Just and Antonine Pious who either appeared to do little in history, or were key figures in ways that don’t easily jump out. The virtues of wisdom, prudence, and humility, will often appear to be outshone by ambition, vision, and great willpower. These latter qualities are not necessarily bad (per C.S. Lewis, we may in fact need many more men with chests), and at the end of the day, Alexander, Genghis, and Napoleon exerted a greater impact on history than almost any other individuals. But Alexander had a first-rate institution-builder for a father, and Napoleon had a brilliant organizer for his chief-of-staff. We should assume that the historical record, and therefore our own day, is full of overlooked and underrated virtuous individuals, who helped enable the success of others, or who solved little problems before they could become big problems.
Please update your priors accordingly.
Cassius Dio, Book 68, 51.1
Herodotus, 3.89
so intriguing!!
i learned so much from this!