180-228 CE (Superpowers)

''This History of the Roman Empire chronicles the reigns of Caesars after Marcus Aurelius. On the eve of its Stoic emperor's death, Rome had risen to an unmatched level of economic and military strength. As nearly the largest and most populous state til that point in human history, it enjoyed geopolitical stability unlike any other. The following pages document the continued rise of this most sublime empire of the Western World and the challenges that it faced.''

Getting started (180 CE)
Caesar Marcus Aurelius died on July 2nd, 180 CE in his quarters of the Domus Augustana, with his surviving children by his side. Historians say Marcus only clung to life as long as he did as to better prepare his beloved adopted son to succeed him as Augustus. As a proper Stoic, Marcus Aurelius requested a modest state funeral, laying his ashes to rest in the Mausoleum of Hadrianus. As the most distinguished man of his day, his passing was mourned by tens of millions of people who knew him as a civic symbol or a military commander.

Cassius Dio's encomium for the late emperor said:

...[Marcus] did not meet with the good fortune that he deserved, for he was not strong in body and was involved in a multitude of troubles throughout practically his entire reign. But for my part, I admire him all the more for this very reason, that amid unusual and extraordinary difficulties he both survived himself and preserved the empire. Perhaps only one thing kept him going through many of these hard times, namely that after rearing and educating his [Sulla's] person in the best possible way he was greatly pleased with him. This matter must be our next topic; for our history continues to go from a kingdom of silver to one of gold, as was thought by the Romans of that day.

Gaius Corellus Sulla, the adopted son of Marcus Aurelius, was recognized by the Senate as pontifex maximus and princeps civitatis on July 6, 180, after he took the name  Gaius Aurelius Sulla Augustus. Contemporaries expected little of the new emperor but by his death Sulla had earned the cognomen Magnus  ( the Great ). Ultimately, history would regard him as one of the most prosperous of the Caesares Boni  (a term coined by a historian of the 6th century in his legendary Romana Historia for the emperors during this progressive period ).

On ascending the curule throne, Sulla ordered the construction of a 5 km thick and 670 km long network of fortifications along the Carpathian Mountains. This limes danuvius consisted of earthenworks walls and ditches north of the Danube that would block the local Quadi and Marcomanni tribes from returning to the land south of the Danube after their defeat by general Tarutenius Paternus. The battle had marked a key turning point in the Marcomannic Wars, allowing Roman generals to focus their efforts on the Iazygean tribes west of Dacia. Generals Tarutenius, Clodius Albinus, Pescennius Niger, and Valerius Maximianus were jointly granted a Triumph when news reached Rome of their success in this last venture a full four years after the death of Marcus. Caesar Sulla dedicated their victory to the name of his adopted father, who had devoted his life to securing the Danubian frontier against the enemies of Rome. In return for the Triumph, the returning generals hailed Sulla as Imperator and gave him the names Germanicus and Sarmaticus, the titles of his father, formally offering Sulla the full support of their legions. A younger Sulla had spent years on campaign with them alongside his adoptive father and had become well-known to these generals as the beloved child of their commander Marcus Aurelius.

Fortifying the limes danuvius obviated the need for a new province of Marcomannia and allowed Rome to distance its military affairs from the activities of the Marcomanni, Quadi, and other local tribes. Near Dacia, the territories of Rome were extended in two directions by the campaign to subdue the Iazyges. By 184, the land between Dacia and the Fluvius Tisia (River Tisza) was administered in cooperation with Iazygean client kings, who had surrendered to the Roman legions, and the land from Dacia to Moesia Inferior - beyond the limes alutanus - came under the control of Roxolani client kings, basically bringing about the ambition of Marcus Aurelius to create a province of Sarmatia (by integrating that land into Lower Moesia). Over time, Roman governors in Dacia slowly procured Iazygean territory for themselves and for Rome, eventually instigating the Iazyges and Roxolani to war, in combination with their resentment for the lack of gracious treatment for administering land on behalf of Rome. However, such transgressions were in the distant and unforeseeable future during the reign of Sulla.

When the Marcomannic campaigns came to an end, the four general returned to Rome for their collective Triumph.

Before the Triumph, the emperor published the Stoic reflections of his father, asking the Stoic school in Athens to create copies in Greek and translate the writings into Latin for easier dissemination. Senators seeking the favor of Sulla read the reflections and often quoted passages in his presence. Their efforts indirectly gave Stoicism a firmer hold on the aristocracy - a prominence which was especially magnified by the long reign of this emperor (in effect, nearly a century of leaders who staunchly follow Stoicism).

After the Triumph, Sulla assisted in the raising of a Victory Column immortalizing the military achievements of his father, giving special honors in its reliefs to the four generals who fought in the wars. The column was erected in the Transitorium, i.e. the Forum Nervae north of the Forum Romanum, directly in front of the Temple of Minerva, both showing respect for Marcus' great-great-grandfather and recognizing the late emperor for his strategic brilliance.

Soon after his death, Marcus Aurelius was deified by the Senate, receiving his own templum in the southern districts of Rome. Every emperor needed to show himself to be a pious man both regarding Roman gods and the genius populi Romani that was worshiped through the emperors. At this time, the Mysteries of Mithras and the worship of Christ were growing in popularity, alarming some in the Senate. Despite rumors of orgies and rape, the so-called Christians had not been complicit in any unrest or violence, prompting Sulla to face them with the same tolerance he presented to followers of Mithras. Since his tolerance of the blasphemous Christians displeased many senators, Sulla sought to  restore and renovate the  Pantheon  in Rome, lavishly decorating it in gold bas-reliefs of the Roman gods and repainting statues and the building exterior. Rome's polytheistic majority was pleased enough that senators could only nod in approval at their leader's piety, despite his continued refusal to persecute groups that were refusing to pay homage to the gods and emperors.

Despite local persecutions in Africa Proconsularis, North African followers of Christ gained ground in Egypt with the foundation of their Didascalium Alexandriae (Theological School of Alexandria) for priests and philosophers. The facility was commissioned by a prominent Stoic named Pantaenus after his return from missionary work in India. His school was the first theological institute for the Christian community and his involvement introduced certain Stoic elements into Christian philosophy.

Also, despite the loss of an Edessan temple in a flood, Mesopotamia became in 201 the first de facto Christian province (by its population). This slow shift was a landmark in the spread of Christians throughout the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, coming only a short time before the more formal (de jure) conversion of the Kingdom of Armenia.

In affairs of the state religion, the haruspices disseminated a prediction that the reign of Sulla would be short and bloody because it began when the sky above Rome - as well as most of the planet - turned red. The natural cause of this phenomenon was a volcanic eruption of vents beneath a lake on the other side of the world - the largest volcanic eruption for centuries. The religious interpretation installed by the haruspices held sway for a couple of decades after the event.

With his first actions, Sulla had facilitated the definitive end to his father's war and supported the state religion of the empire, swiftly moving to prove his worth to the Senate and people of Rome. As a sign of peace in 184, Sulla revalued the denarius, the primary coin used for state expenditure, increasing its silver content from a low of ~79% purity up to ~89% purity. His denarius had a weight of silver that had not been seen since the days of Claudius - 3.42 grams of the precious metal. Keeping currencies in line, he also raised the weight of gold in an aureus to a total of 8.00 grams. Sulla understood enough to know that the public wealth would be strained by minting more expensive currency, and that eventually plunder from war would be needed to sustain the new currency. Nevertheless, Sulla gave away the first batch of new denarii during the ceremony of closing the Gates of Janus, a Roman symbol of peace that was also depicted on the side of these coins opposite a portrait of Marcus Aurelius.

Like his father, Sulla personally received appeals in court, hearing disputes and settling public petitions with his own judgement. For his just rulings and fervent commitment to the judiciary, Sulla found his most ardent supporters among jurists and advocates, who publicly praised him for having "the heart and tongue of a Tullian". Sulla's personal involvement in law persisted throughout his life, except when he was campaigning with his armies far beyond the city walls of Rome.

On the whole, Sulla did little but see legal clients and participate in religious ceremonies for the first four years of his reign. He was a young and largely symbolic ruler who did not possess a great deal of respect before the greatest generals in the empire pledged their support to him during the grand triumphal parade that Sulla was holding in honor of them and his father. From 184 onward, the new emperor rode the popular approval from the closing of the Marcomannic Wars and was gaining the respect of senators for his effective handling of the consolidation of land after the defeat of Rome's enemies in Dacia.

In general, Southeastern Europe seemed firmly under the control of Rome and the Senate continued to believe that the Roman dominion over Africa and Gallia was as secure as that over Italy and Greece. In its view, nothing could halt the present course as long as Roman magistrates remained competent and Roman legions stayed compliant. The continuation of stable leadership kept the empire as a fruitful environment for progress in art and philosophy.

Advances in medicine
One of the greatest physicians who lived during the classical era was Galen of Pergamon. This Greek had already garnered the attention of Sulla from his time in the imperial court of Marcus Aurelius but it took news of his recent publications on recommended hygienic practices and on paralysis by severance of the spinal cord to remind the emperor of his expertise. In 181, Sulla hired Galen as his personal physician, bringing the man back to Rome to work with the nobility. As a philosopher and as a physician, Galen was publicly famous for original treatises on the Antonine Plague, supplemented in 188 with the new Treatise on Various Temperaments that described symptoms of the disease and how they were alleviated. As the emperor's physician, Galen treated dozens of senators. By that time, he had elevated his reputation to that of the most celebrated physician in the empire. Nobles and wealthy merchants traveled to Rome to seek treatment from Galen. He was the most skilled brain surgeon and eye surgeon, succeeding in the vast majority of his operations, easily taking cataracts out of people's eyes and relieving intracranial pressure without damage. In the diligent hands of their new physician, the Roman nobility improved dramatically in their health.

A man with the skills and knowledge of Galen was considered a great boon during these dark times for the health of citizens. There had been persistent cases of a plague throughout the reign of Marcus Aurelius and the threat of this disease loomed over the entire empire when Sulla came to power. At the behest of Galen and pressured by this looming threat, the emperor commissioned in 183 a facility for medical research and practice in the eastern provinces, a region where Galen considered such a thing most suited. The dreadful Antonine Plague was thought to come from this direction and sickness was as prevalent there as anywhere, providing an ample number of patients and a plethora of test subjects. In 187, the partially constructed Academia Medica Galena was inaugurated in the city of Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem), on the former location of the city's asclepeion (healing temple).

Galen received total authority over his academy when he moved there the following year, under the mandate of advancing Roman understanding of the body and the treatment of its ailments. His academy originally consisted of five facilities: a library for texts on medicine, a medical center for treating local patients, a research center for studying body parts and sick people, an office for paperwork and the leisure of the staff, and an operating room for closely studying human cadavers. The central facility could be seen across Aelia Capitolina by the red banner around its tall central tower. Anyone could find its hospital in times of need.

Medical treatises from the bibliotecae (libraries) of Alexandria, Pergamum, and Jerusalem were copied for the library of the new academy. By 197, Galen possessed copies of more than half of all medical works known to the Romans. Within only ten years of opening, the academy turned Aelia Capitolina into the foremost city for medical research in the Western world, in no small part due to the vastness of this library. There had been no other point in history when a student of medicine could find nearly the entirety of his civilization's written knowledge about medicine in a single place. This unprecedented access to information played a large part in the success of research done at the academy.

The local availability of information fostered renewed debate among physicians and philosophers practicing out of the academy. Proponents of the three dominant Roman schools of medicine spoke regularly in the library of the academy and were personally encouraged by Galen to resolve disagreements over facts and methods. One school argued that the treatment of a disease bore no relation to its cause as found through the patient's history. This Methodic doctrine presented medicine as the art of identifying an illness by its symptoms alone then preceding to administer the general cure specific to people with those symptoms.

Methodic medicine arose in reaction to the Empiric and Dogmatic doctrines. The latter argued that symptoms of a disease were signs of an underlying state in the patient and that treatment had to be specific to this hidden state, known only by inference from the symptoms and the history of the patient in comparison with knowledge of the inner workings of a human body. By contrast, the former school advised physicians not to pursue knowledge of the body but only to concern themselves with what worked in the past to cure patients with similar symptoms and medical history. In collecting the works of all three schools in one place and encouraging diverse physicians to study there, Galen and his academy brought these debates to a head, resulting in the union of the Empiric and Dogmatic schools of medicine into an empirical school that admitted the role of underlying states in sickness and in health.

Widespread agreement was reached by 199 on the existence of hidden states and their role in certain illnesses. Conversely, the more prominent members of the medical community who were involved in these debates also agreed that the most practical way to treat a disease was to repeat methods which have been successful in the past, even when these treatments were not informed by a deeper understanding of the human body. Galen would write in a late treatise on the debate that "medicine lay in its infancy and a great deal more remained to be learned about how Man functioned". Unfortunately, this prescription was ignored by many of his successors, leading to a stagnation of medicine in the centuries after Galen. Nevertheless, doctors would at least be informed in their diagnoses, prognoses, and prescriptions by both experiential medical knowledge and reasoning from knowledge of the body (albeit with limited information on both fronts from the perspective of modernity).

Doctrinal union in medicine led to a homogenization of medical practice throughout the Roman Empire. After a few more decades, every practicing physician followed the Galen doctrine and learned at institutions modeled after his academy. The result was an unprecedented level of organization for medical practice in the empire and the creation of a unified medical community that follows the same treatments and uses the same terminology. Within several decades, certain aspects of Roman medicine became common knowledge, including the importance of hygiene and exercise for personal health. In a sense, the knowledge of doctors disseminated itself with Roman culture in the manner of other memes of a culture.

Public medicine
Before Galen, healing centers for slaves, gladiators, and soldiers - known as valetudinaria - could be found throughout the empire but citizens sought treatment from either a medicus (doctor) or a temple of Aesculapius (asclepeion). Neither of these options were formally organized or regarded as highly by the public as doctors would be after Galen. In the early stages, his work inspired a group of doctors in the city of Alexandria to found their own facility for medical practice, in the Galenic tradition, by building an expansive facility on the local aesculapium, adding an atrium for patients to wait before seeing a doctor, a basement for dissecting and studying cadavers, a side wing where hundreds of patients could be treated in beds, and another side wing for surgery and the cauterizing of wounds. Their facility also took upon itself the task of instructing the next generation of physicians in medicine, making attempts to abide by similar conventions of terminology and procedure as established by the Galenic Academy.

This model for a healing center was dubbed a galenaria (hospital) and was endorsed by the provincial government of Egypt, by it paying all of the wages for the doctors from its public coffers. Private hospitals following this model spread to Syracuse, Tyrus, Corinthia, Naples, and eventually Rome by 199. The galenaria in Rome was founded at the behest of Sulla, who spent millions of denarii on building the facility on the Campus Martius (Field of Mars). Doctors were sought from among those practicing in each city where a hospital was opened and, at least in Rome, doctors were paid a fixed wage by the Senate. Most galenariae were huge buildings, larger than any temples in their cities, prompting negative reactions from the priesthood who felt that the gods were being overshadowed by a "cult of Galen". This reaction speaks volumes about the prominence of these new institutions.

When a galenaria was funded by the public, as in the capital, certain free treatments were administered to patients. Anything that was necessary for the survival of a patient, as decided at the discretion of the doctor, was free but Galen left behind his own set of guidelines to inform these decisions. Some public hospitals could churn a profit by charging for requested procedures, haircuts, and health check-ups but private hospitals had no difficulty making money with patients paying for all services. A few hospitals even hired a rabbi to perform circumcisions, with the  additional benefit of giving the Senate accurate records for the distribution of the empire's population of Jews.

Referencing texts by Aretaeus, Hippocrates, and other eminent physicians, Galen produced his De Remediis in 196, a thorough collection of the most reliable methods for treating disease according to symptoms. This text was a massive codex with enough accurate information to inform other doctors in recognizing tuberculosis, malaria, pneumonia, and other diseases by their basic signs in the condition of a patient. Tremendous detail went into describing symptoms and no diseases recognized at the time were missed or ignored. No greater or even comparable treatise on medical practice existed in the empire, marking the book De Remediis as a landmark in the teaching of medical knowledge - the first comprehensive encyclopedia of diseases.

Medical procedure
Meanwhile, Galen and his colleagues worked to advance medical practice. At the time, medicine focused on prescribing regiminae (therapies) and medicinae (treatments) for health problems. Neither method had a rigorous basis but a number of effective measures against disease had been found by chance. Roman doctors already knew countless surgical procedures, herbs, diets, and exercises that could treat certain ailments and Galen sought to expand this tool set. Before the year 200, Galen alone published over 300 works on medicine, covering topics as diverse as pathology, physiology, anatomy, medical botany, oral hygiene, and pharmacology alongside dozens of other fields. Public and private donations flowed into his academy, giving him ample funds to expand the operations of its facilities and to accommodate more patients, bodies, and books. A number of the hospitals founded throughout the Roman world around this time were financed by the Galenic Academy, under the direction of Galen himself.

In matters of hygiene, Galen made several discoveries during his tenure that he eventually recommended to doctors in the Roman medical community. First, he prescribed brushing with toothpaste twice a day for patients showing certain mouth diseases or even for complaints of mouth pain. Some of Galen's books noted that people who brushed regularly with toothpaste had more pleasing and healthier mouths, starting the slow spread of a practice for both doctors and nobles to regularly brush their teeth even in the absence of mouth disease. Galen also demanded that everyone involved in a surgery should wash their hands and arms with concentrated vinegar - the same substance that surgeons had long been using on wounds.

Although the importance of cleansing wounds was already known, Galen discovered that sickness could spread by contact with dead bodies, after noticing that doctors who worked with corpses tended to make their patients ill. After trying a number of ways of preventing this spread (by a method of experimentation that surely violated his Hippocratic oath), Galen touched on washing with vinegar to prevent the spread of certain diseases from the sick or the dead.

Finally, Galen described several procedures for instituting a quarantine of people in a variety of contexts. There were brief mentions in his later works on how to quarantine a city when a plague swept through the countryside but his most detailed notes were on the quarantine of sick within a city hospital, as a means of slowing the spread of a plague within that city (the Antonine Plague remained an obsession of Galen throughout his life). He advised keeping patients in one room of a hospital where they could be visited by doctors to prescribe whatever treatments were available but that when a doctor finished he was to use the hospital's bath to scrub his entire body with vinegar and be cleansed with oil. Galen said that this removed the miasmatic essence that clung to one's body after contact with the bad air around sick or dead people.

Experiments in the Academy on cadavers were widely known and autopsies were a decent means for it to make money but more nefarious activities occurred in its sublevels. On request, local authorities began bringing Galen live convicts to supply his human vivisections. The discoveries Galen made through live dissection were the primary factor in ending the debate between the Empiric and Dogmatic schools of medicine, demonstrating that a great deal could be learned about human physiology and that this knowledge could be correlated with symptoms of certain diseases.

Galen confirmed numerous theories of the ancient doctor Herophilos: that the brain is the seat of intelligence, that blood flows away from the heart through the arteries and toward it through the veins, and that nerves transmitted intentions to the muscles and sensation to the mind. These experiments solidified agreement on these facts about human physiology. This consensus opened the route to a more specific understanding of the nervous and circulatory systems.

Medical discoveries
Galen did more than simply confirm the theories of his predecessors. Great contributions to medical and anatomical knowledge grew out of his vivisections and dissections. Galen established that the blood flowing through the arteries and veins was the same fluid, that the septum separating the cardial ventricles was impermeable to blood, that contractions of different parts of the heart were the cause of blood flow to specific parts of the body, that blood flows from the heart to the lungs to mix with air to produce sanguis pneumata (arterial blood), that blood circulated rather than oscillated or stagnated (he observed that about two ounces of blood left the heart per beat, necessitating recycling of the blood), that veinous valves prevented blood from flowing backward, that neither the heart nor brain alone regulated body temperature, and that the appendix can be safely removed from a person, particularly for the treatment of certain illnesses. Galen performed the first successful appendectomy on a live patient in 198, carefully recording what made this attempt more successful than his dozens of prior failures. After a few more years, Galen wrote a treatise on a reliable method for performing an appendectomy, a procedure which he prescribed for alleviating a certain class of pains in the lower right section of the abdomen.

In addition to his contributions to knowledge of blood vessels, Galen observed a number of facts about nerves. Alongside the venerable Erasistratus, Galen categorized nerves into sensory and motor nerves. The former were supposed to transmit data from the senses to the brain while the latter were thought to transmit intentions from the brain to the muscles. Galen disagreed with Herophilos on the notion that neural transmissions functioned by exchange of pneuma (breath), as Galen thought pneuma was one of two essential components of arterial blood rather than nerves. Instead, he proposed the existence of a unique fluid that filled the nerves. Supposing that this fluid was produced in the brain, where he located the psyche (intelligence) of a person, Galen named this fluid psychon (Greek: ψυχων) and speculated that it carried information as vibrations induced either by stimuli (for sensory nerves) or by the psyche (for motor nerves). Besides this wild speculation about nerves, Galen also identified specific spinal nerves with the muscle groups they controlled, such as observing that the laryngeal nerve only affected the voice. Some structures in the brain such as the corpus callosum and putamen were also described for the first time by Galen. Similarly, he identified the main arteries supplying blood to the brain, now known as the cerebral arterial circle.

More impressive than these theoretical discoveries is Galen's development of reliable medical protocols for eye, chest, throat, and brain surgeries that would not permanently injure patients. Such procedures were major breakthroughs. Using his methods, even surgeons of normal skill could be relied upon to perform surgery on the brain, eye, or spine.

There were also setbacks in Galen's work. Bloodletting was not only advocated by his hospitals but he invented a rigorous methodology for the practice. The four humors theory of sickness and health was strongly emphasized in his books, providing numerous arguments in its favor. Among these harmful mistakes, Galen also proposed numerous incorrect theories about the body: a bipartite theory of the psyche that divided it into an animal (voluntary) part in the brain and vegetative (autonomic) part in the liver; that toxins in the body ultimately deposit in the appendix, necessitating its removal in some people; and that blood was replenished and created in the liver. His ideas on the physiology of the nervous system also established fundamentally incorrect ideas but these were steps forward for medicine, approaching the actual electrochemical behavior of that system.

The work of Galen, prior to his death at the ripe age of 89, set the stage for the next 1,600 years of Roman medicine. It is fair to say that medical science barely advanced after his discoveries until the 1800's. For this reason, historians say that Galen was to medicine what Aristotle was to logic. The institutions he inspired - galenariae - established medicus (doctor) and chirurgius (surgeon) as highly respected secular professions and his unification of the medical community in a doctrinal and political sense played an essential role in creating the public health care system that Romans continue to enjoy.

Early rule (181-190)
As emperor of the largest empire in the world, Sulla faced numerous hurdles during the early part of his reign. In the north of the island of Britannia, the Picts finally overran the abandoned Antonine Wall (Vallum Antoninum), putting pressure on Hadrian's Wall farther south. Senators were alarmed by reports coming from the garrisons along the wall between 182 and 185 and asked the new imperator to handle this military threat to the province. In response, he transferred the auxiliary cohorts in Alpes Cottiae to the wall and appointed Tarutenius Paternus as legatus augustus (military governor) of Britain. In order to maintain a military presence in Cottiae, the province was combined with Alpes Poeninae into the imperial province of Alpes Ulterior and cohorts stationed in Poeninae were spread across the whole of the new province. The main highway connecting Colonia Lugdunum and Taurinorum, passing through the main castra (forts) in the Alps, was renovated to lower the effect of a smaller military presence.

From his position as governor, Tarutenius raided ports along the eastern coast of Caledonia (Scotland) until about 188, taking the meagre wealth of the locals for himself and his troops. His raids instilled a greater fear of Rome in the Caledonii. For the most part, the spoils of these skirmishes were small gold trinkets and animal bone jewelry, alongside thousands of prisoners taken as slaves. Meanwhile, the Senate diverted funds toward the creation of a new merchant fleet known as the classis africana annona, as a tool for securing grain shipping routes between Africa Proconsularis and Italy against piracy. The existence of a new fleet led to a rapid fall in the rates of pirate attacks in the Mare Internum (Mediterranean Sea).

Another major expense during the first decade under Sulla was the restoration of the Pontum Traiani (Trajan's Bridge) spanning the Danube north of the town of Bononia in Moesia Superior. Over 1.1 km long, this segmental arch bridge had allowed for the original conquest of Dacia by Caesar Trajan but was partially dismantled by his successor to remove the risk that barbarians would take control of it and cross into more stable provinces. With Dacia more pacified, the utility of the bridge far outweighed the risks and its reconstruction was deemed less costly than building a new bridge. The archways on either side of the bridge were integrated into stone forts through from which travelers had to gain permission to cross the Danube there. These forts were placed under the control of a single cohort of 600 auxiliary soldiers.

Finances
Although these expenses were costly, Sulla maintained a strong treasury by frequently refusing spending on gladiatorial games and by increasing taxes on slaves as well as the theater. Senators were encouraged to finance public festivals and games from their own wealth, as a traditional duty of the patrician elite to the people of Rome. Although risky for an emperor, giving senators this task for which the common people would love them was safe in his case due to the love that people bore for Marcus Aurelius (of course, the imperial purse still bore a large share of the financial burden for festivals - the difference was only that senators were pushed to take larger shares than before so that overall spending by the emperor could decrease).

At this time, public funds were distinguished into three accounts: the aerarium militare, for paying the pensions of legionaries; the aerarium populi romani, for ordinary expenditure by the Senate; and the fiscus, for the personal expenses of the emperor. In practice, Sulla controlled the spending of all three treasuries but in principle, he could not independently use the treasury that the Senate managed. Special taxes existed to maintain the small military treasury but most taxes from the provinces administered by the Senate went to the other aerarium. A physical vault known as the aerarium stabulum stored much of the money for all of these accounts alongside legion standards, brass tables of law, and various important papers for the Senate. This vault was secured within the Temple of Saturn on the main forum and was overseen by appointees of the emperor with praetorian rank.

Nearly three-quarters of public revenue was spent on maintaining the military and another tenth sustained the public grain dole (alimenta) and grain subsidies for the urban poor in the capital. Although the dole itself only amounted to enough grain to feed less than 200,000 people, the subsidies were important for maintaining the price of grain around one denarius per modius (6.67 kg). The rest of state revenues paid for public works, civil servants, public festivals, and the support of local governments that operated on behalf of Rome. In general, the regime of Sulla adopted proportionally low enough expenses to build-up a large treasury.

Stability
With the Marcomannic Wars at an end and the fortifications along the Carpathians nearly complete, Rome was poised to enjoy a period of reasonable stability. Hispania (Spain), Britannia (Britain), and Gallia (Gaul) had been restful for the last century but for one minor rebellion. In 186, the Gauls rose against Roman taxes, forcing a response by a nearby legion led by the famous general Clodius Albinus. Unfortunately, Clodius was killed by a stray arrow during the uprising. As a war hero, he was mourned by hundreds of thousands of Romans and a citywide funeral was held for him in Rome. Afterward, the Gauls were villified in Italy and attempts were made by the Gallic elite to show Rome that their nation was firmly in its favor. By the 3rd century, the notion of revolt was no less repugnant in Gaul than in Italy (even in Rome itself, commoners would violently protest high prices or taxes).

Meanwhile, the governor of Germania Superior had gained renown when, under a deficiency of legionaries, he defeated a highly organized force of Chatti using archers as his primary instrument. Publius Helvius Pertinax, as he was known, was a man of good reputation in the Senate and made every effort to play up his victory to his peers. As a result, his maneuvers in 188 were lauded by Sulla and other generals, bringing a greater respect for archery within the upper ranks of the Legion and in Rome.

Around the same time ,  general prices in Egypt  were rising as the local tetradrachm, which served as currency in place of traditional Roman coins, suffered inflation. Receiving complaints from local citizens, Sulla reacted in 187  by beginning to transition the local economy to a common currency with the rest of the empire. Until this change could be completed, Sulla offered loans to merchants who would import their goods into Egypt and then removed taxes on these imports. Alongside the direct effect this had on prices, this also  lowered the local money supply  enough after a decade to further lower prices. By  198, Egypt had switched entirely to Roman coinage, a state of affairs that would prevent a recurrence of the same monetary issues and brought a complete end to the sporadic unrest that arose as a result of rising prices.

Administrative reform
Rome governed more people than almost any other political entity in history. Risks from this size were recognized by the Senate and by Sulla, who believed that only military coercion and desire for stability held the empire of Rome together. Unlike the Old Republic, when Rome was only the region of Latium, the present one was not politically unified except in Italia and had no single cultural identity uniting the interests of people across the territories. The emperor was convinced that if either of the present forces unifying the empire somehow became unreliable, then all three continents would degrade into another Germany. Since the empire had almost a century of unprecedented stability recently, barring the Marcomannic Wars, Sulla took this opportunity to reform the politics of the empire and create a more durable form of government.

For this purpose, Sulla brought about the division of the Populus Romanus into nominally independent nations. Modeled after the policy of foederati (vassal kingdoms), a foederata (vassal nation) was a federation of provinces that had no military and no currency but administered its own affairs within the territory of Rome. Provinces within a foederata were still governed by Roman governors appointed by the Senatus Romanus but the federation itself had a Consul Gentis (loosely President of the Nation) that could impeach these governors and request funds from the state treasury for spending in his foederata. In principle, a Consul had to originate from the nation he governed but the looseness of this criterion later allowed many senators to hold this high office with little understanding of the local culture of their respectively assigned nations.

After the division in 190, the recognized nations of the empire were: Italia, Arabia, Gallia, Illyria, Dacia, Graecia, Asia, Syria, Africa, Hispania, Ægyptus, and Germania Minor. Each foederata had its own Consul who was appointed by the emperor from among the senators who trace their family origins to that region. A Consul was encouraged to enforce ius civile (civil law), which is to say Roman law, through his authority over governors in his nation and to organize festivals and public works for his people. This office involved the effective abolition of the original office of Consul, with a spiritual successor in the Consul of the Italians. Pertinax was named Consul Italiorum and Lucius Antistius Brutus, the brother-in-law of the emperor, was named Consul Africanorum when this political reform was accepted by the Senate.

In general, the reform involved a shift in financial power from the Senate to a decentralized network of magistrates and gave the emperor a closer eye on the attitudes and concerns of the different nations that constituted his empire. One of the primary duties of a Consul was to send letters to Rome about problems in his foederata - a procedure that propaganda portrayed as a direct link to the Roman government but that served the purpose of preempting violent unrest. Other propaganda portrayed the new system as a gift of autonomy and recognition to the various nations. The word foederata itself was meant in a similar sense as foederatus but had a connotation of greater prestige. In this way, a consul had the public image of being the civil leader of a nation that owed allegiance to Rome for the gifts of stability and prosperity. The continued appointment of Roman governors by the Roman Senate and Caesar was described as the best means of extending proper civil law over all the communities within the civilized world (as distinguished from the barbarian lands that lay beyond the limites of the Roman Empire). In this sense, the domain of Rome was starting to be understood as a community of nations led by the city of Rome and nations outside this community were simply ones that were not exposed to the benefits of Roman law, Roman commerce, and Roman security.

Sulla relieved the provinces of the sense that a foreign culture was imposed upon their traditional lifestyles and independence, by giving them a feeling of self-government and by encouraging the celebration of their cultures. At the same time, he increased the level of oversight that the capital had over its territories, further lowering the risk of internal conflict.

Fire of Rome
Unfortunately, this reform supporting peace and stability coincided with tragedy in Rome. On 11 August 192, a fire started in the Subura district and spread to much of the Collis Viminalis and Collis Quirinalis. Sulla and the Senate devoted a large amount of treasury money toward helping the common people rebuild. Despite the cost, Sulla ordered that houses be built of higher quality material, favoring brick and stone over wood, and that the streets be made slightly wider the cramped spaces of older Rome. Some roads had almost been too thin for more than a handful of people to walk abreast. Despite some senators pushing for fewer blocks of apartments (insulae) in Rome, the decision was made to simply build apartments with less flammable materials and designs.

A major design element of houses built after the fire was the lack of confined or unreachable spaces in the structure, as a measure to prevent the nesting of pests such as rats and pigeons. In the long-run, this decision drastically slowed the spread of disease in the capital and reduced the frequency of large outbreaks. Similar motives drove the Senate to place this restriction on architects as convinced Sulla of the need for the Galenic medical academy - the recent concerns over the Antonine plague.

In the wake of the Great Fire of Rome, the Senate and Sulla took administrative steps toward reducing the vulnerability of Rome to future blazes. Although this fire gave the Quirinal and Viminal Hills less risky architecture and the Great Fire of 64 CE gave the Caelian and Palatine Hills better fire resistance, the city still suffered looters and arsonists who assisted the spread of the fires and small fires were a known risk for larger infernos (a small fire in the hearth of an apartment was believed to have set off this latest conflagration). A fire department was founded as a service distinct from the vigiles urbani (watchmen of the city) and manned by slaves volunteered by their masters on a rotation - in other words, a citizen could put a slave under the authority of a praefectus spartolianum (overseer of fire fighters) for a day or two each week. Over time, various measures would be attempted to ensure a sufficient number of spartoliani for protecting the capital.

Slaves who were volunteered to fight fires received training to fill various roles in the service. A siphonarius operated the siphon for pumping water over a fire, an aquarius managed the supplies of water, and all spartoliani carried a mixture of axes, buckets, mattocks, picks, and wired hooks for dismantling masonry. Although spartoliani in some parts of Rome had water carts (aquifera) from which water could be pumped, spartoliani in poorer districts relied on water towers built over houses and apartments. One of the duties of spartoliani when there were no fires to combat was to check the water level in these towers, keep them full, and clean them out on a regular basis to prevent the breeding of mosquitoes in its stagnant waters.

As part of modifications to the municipal government of Rome, Sulla transferred some responsibilities of the praefectus urbanus (urban prefect of Rome) to a praefectus collegianum, who supervised the local guilds and kept them from instigated violence in the streets, and gave control over the cohortes urbanae (urban riot police) to a committee of equestrian procuratores. By the 3rd century, the duty of the urban prefect was the coordination between the various overseers of municipal affairs in Rome.

On the whole, the situation in Rome did not return to normal until a decade after the conflagration, when the new services were reaching their strides and the burned districts had finished being rebuilt. Although Rome had recovered, there was no effective way for the Senate to ensure that its vulnerability to urban fires would not rise again. Nationwide regulations for cities would eventually keep the risk permanently below a certain level but the overgrowth of markets with wooden stalls would ultimately reintroduce the necessary fuel for a great fire at the heart of the empire.

Scientific progress
While medical science grew from the prodigious output of Galen, other sciences experienced less marked advances of their own:

The astronomer Cleomedes, famous for spreading the discoveries of Posidonius of Rhodes, was making his own discoveries. Cleomedes is recorded teaching at his schools in Greece in 186 that the atmosphere deviates the straight path of light, in 190 that the Moon is not a source of light but reflects light from the Sun, and in 196 that the Earth's shadow during an eclipse shows its sphericity as clearly as any other evidence. His work was also the first classical treatise to expound the procedure of Eratosthenes for measuring the circumference of the Earth as 252,000 stadia (39,690 km). Cleomedes preached the perfect accuracy of this measurement but it is actually 2% lower than the true value.

Cleomedes had discovered essential features of the universe, as understood by Romans. Only three decades earlier, Ptolemy had created accurate tables for predicting the positions of the planets based on a geocentric model of the universe. While this geocentrism was already the dominant position in astronomy, Ptolemy's mathematics raised its status to the level of dogma. According to the Ptolemaic model, Cleomedes had made discoveries about the very center of the universe: measuring its exact dimensions, describing its interaction with light, and disseminating this knowledge to the his students. Although the geocentric model would be falsified centuries later, these discoveries were celebrated in their time.

From the point of view of the emperor, these changes in philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy were of little concern. As a Stoic like his father, Sulla was most concerned with practical matters, such as maintaining a healthy populace, unlike the more abstract pursuit of expanding our knowledge about nature. For this reason, the other science to which Sulla devoted public funds was that of geography. In the hopes of improving shipping routes, he commissioned four dozen sailing ships in 214 to map the entire Mediterranean from West to East. Three decades of work went into the production of an accurate representation of the empire's private lake, resulting in the unmatched Carta Mediterranea. No body of land smaller than a trireme was missed by this expedition. The new science of tablographia (cartography) was born from the publication of this detailed map as future merchants and sailors continued creating, modifying, and selling maps based on its representation of the Mediterranean Sea. The original map itself was a codex (book) consisting of over 80 pages, with one continental map drawn according to the more detailed regional maps.

Since unskilled or even downright fraudulent doctors were not uncommon, the Medical Academy in Aelia Capitolina furnished its successful students with certificates that verified their skill and knowledge. In 196, Sulla issued an edict placing severe penalties on the falsification of such qualifications and used propaganda to discourage citizens from seeking uncertified medici. Almost two centuries later, another emperor would issue an edict forcing every practicing medicus or chirurgius to obtain a license by passing federal examinations at one of the many national academies for medicine. A license had to be displayed in a hospital where a doctor or surgeon practiced, if he was employed by a public hospital. By 393, a law was passed outlawing private hospitals and doctor's offices; however, licensed medical practitioners were permitted to serve as the private physician of a person, leaving a viable career path for a licensed medical expert who could not find work at a public hospital. These measures ensured a definitive end for private medicine and enforced a single national standard for the quality of medical care within the empire.

More than astronomy, geography, and medicine were advancing during the reign of Sulla. In the Greek provinces, the philosophical and mathematical schools went about business as usual. Certain discoveries made during the 2nd century were beginning to spread from Greece to the philosophical teachers in the capital. Among these developments were a detailed arithmetic and novel number theory, presenting the known perfect and prime numbers through the lens of a Platonic-Empiricist mathematical philosophy, that came from Nicomachus of Gerasa, and a book Sphaerica by Menelaus of Alexandria that pioneered the field of spherical trigonometry as well as established a primitive concept of geodesics (shortest paths on spheres). Similar works on cylindrical and conic geometry were written at the time by Serenus of Antinoopolis while a summary of geometric surveying was propagated by the great Hero of Alexandria.

Perhaps the greatest inventor and mathematician of his century, Hero left behind a number of discoveries and devices that either served some practical purpose or demonstrated his natural philosophy to his contemporaries. His aeolipile provided insight into the operation of the wind and his wind-wheel was the first device to directly harness windpower. Some of his practical inventions were: a displacement pump with applications as a fire engine, pulley systems for behind the stage in a theater, a syringe for medical use, and a fountain powered by stored hydrostatic energy. Emperors had commissioned his pump for stationary pump-operated fire engines that could be brought to the scene of a fire by the department in Rome while his pulleys, fountain, and syringe became part of the ubiquitous technologies that distinguished the Roman Empire (such as aqueducts, concrete, and domes).

Anyone familiar with natural philosophy at the time would have been aware of Hero and his inventions. Similarly, any educated doctor used his syringe, most architects knew the concept of his fountain, and many Roman theaters took advantage of his pulley designs. However, the Roman world had no centralized education - even in the field of medicine - that could guarantee the universal use of new tools so the dissemination of Hero's inventions took time and followed largely unregulated channels.

Jewish migration
As a way of defusing tensions with Jews in his empire, Sulla repealled Hadrian's edict outlawing circumcised men (Jewish males) from the city of Aelia Capitolina by his own edict in 185 CE. He believed that his predecessor had made a mistake in listening to his advisors and not rebuilding the city for the Jews. Roman temples were not taken away and the name was kept but the older parts of the city became the focus of public funding for the tens of thousands of returning Jews. Sulla made a grand event of their return, including a speech saying this was an olive branch to the Jewish community and not to be taken lightly. He warned that they could either demonstrate cooperation with Rome or face a repeat of their earlier defeat.

With the restoration of their great city, an enormous number of Jews returned to Syria Palestina from across the empire. Almost without delay, they reformed exclusively Jewish communities within their holy city. A small number of money changers and lenders would handle the conversion from profane currencies to proper religious currencies for locals and pilgrims. These Jewish merchants would soon shift to secure venues for their practice but they initially operated from their usual benches.

In 193, Sulla repealed the fiscus judaicus (tax on Jews), strengthening the position of his Jewish supporters and drowning out those voices who remained skeptical of his treatment.

Military events (191-200)
Rebellious generals were always a problem for Caesars, as evidenced by such events as the bellum civile of 68-69. To avoid the possibility of a single man holding more sway than himself over legions, Sulla delocalized the payment of legionaries through curatores in the home province of a legion. This edict of 192 CE removed one incentive by which a general could goad soldiers to support him. However, the surefire method for keeping the trust of the Legion was still military victory so in December of 191, the emperor assembled a force of six legions for training in Belgica. April of the following year, Sulla greeted the army, proclaiming his intent to launch a series of raids against the tribes of Magna Germania (Greater Germany).

Over the next three years, the legions captured 2 million denarii worth of gold, jewels, and equipment alongside over 11.9 million denarii in German slaves. Besides the thousands of people taken as slaves, an estimated 9,000 were slaughtered in their villages and 26,000 killed in battle. The empire's superior tactics, training, and equipment permitted only 168 deaths among legionaries and a few hundred among auxiliaries. One German tactic, however, that caught the eye of the emperor was their use of bows which, while largely ineffective against the scutum and lorica of legionaries, were devastating against lightly armored foes.

Legion archers
With the growing respect for archery in the Legion, several commanders were calling for the creation of professional divisions of archers for the Legion, the first being founded in Legio Gemina X in 199. By 201 CE, there were nine more cohortes milliaria sagittariorum (regiments of archers) and a year later, Sulla had regulated these regiments to 1,000 archers each. Earlier archer-units were part of the auxiliary forces of the empire, consisting of non-citizens who provided field support to the legions. At the time, there were 32 archer-units in the Auxilia, out of which almost a third were horse archers. Citizens could only become part of an archery cohort by joining the Auxilia but reforms of this time period led to the integration of archery regiments into legions, where archers would exclusively consist of citizens.

Each sagittariorum was assigned to a specific legion. An archer in such a regiment was called a sagittarius and his weapons were the arcus (bow) and sagittae (arrows). Auxiliary archers had employed a carefully crafted composite bow with a short body, often for more effective use on horseback, but the new regiments equipped their archers with the arcus ligneis, a bow with a longer body that provided longer range and power at the cost of mobility. Since legion archers were expected to march at the pace of heavy infantry and were deployed on foot, the costs were considered minor for the rewards.

In the context of the growing respect for archery in the Legion, these displays of the prowess of archers led to the formation of the first professional archery unit for the Legion, given to Legio Gemina X in 199. This unit was not the last. By 200 CE, nine other cohortes milliaria sagittariorum (archery regiments), that were 1,000 strong, got added to legions. Each sagittariorum was combined with one legion to provide support for its troops during conflict on open terrain. An archer in such a regiment was called a sagittarius and his weapons were the arcus (bow) and sagittae (arrows). Romans normally employed a carefully crafted composite bow with a short body for effective use on horseback. By contrast, the new sagittariorum were infantry units. For this reason, the decision was made to equip them with arcus ligneis that had a longer body, providing less mobility for longer range and power. This was a good fit for the comparatively heavy infantry units of a legion.

By the end of the reign of Sulla, every legion had an integrated unit of citizen archers but the numbers for auxiliary archers were not reduced. Instead, the auxiliaries concentrated further on mounted archers, bringing their particular numbers up to 12,000 men. Over time, legion archers would become exclusively associated with infantry while auxiliary archers were the mounted variety.

Parthian War
Sulla hoped to enjoy a brief peace when he returned to Rome for his first Triumph. Sadly, his peace was broken by an invasion of the client kingdom of Osroene by the Persian Shah, Vologases V, in 195. Seeking to retake lands lost to Marcus Aurelius, the Parthian Persians were resolute. Nevertheless, despite the regret of the emperor for not expanding the armies in the East, he managed to arrive with four legions of veterans from Germania, beating back the Persian threat. Babylon and the Parthian capital city of Ctesiphon were sacked by Rome while the mighty fortress of Atra, supposedly impossible to take, was - true to its reputation - not taken by Rome but instead burned to the ground.

Vologases himself was captured during the 197 CE sacking of the capital. His ransom back to Parthia for 60 million denarii almost doubled the size of the Roman treasury. Adding to this amount the magnificent plunder from sacking Persian cities, the aeraria and fiscus (imperial purse) were filled to unprecedented levels. Moreover, the limes arabicus, eastern frontier of the empire, was expanded deeper into Parthia through an advance of the border with the re-institution of the imperial province of Mesopotamia. The new territory incorporated formerly Parthian lands and was largely administered by client kings of the Osroene. This conflict and its resolution provided longstanding reasons for animosity between Rome and Parthia for the foreseeable future (despite periods of peace and commerce).

While Sulla would spend the newfound wealth judiciously over his reign, this did not stop him from extending a congiarium of 100 denarii to the entire province of Syria Palestina on his way to Rome for his second Triumph. Combined with the reopening in 198 of trade with Parthia under favorable terms for Roman merchants, the province was experiencing an economic boom that was dramatically outpacing other regions of the empire.

Some Roman colonists in towns near Aelia Capitolina had begun to mistreat and rob from their Jewish neighbors, in opposition to their return. Money lenders and money changers in the city were common targets of these malcontents. Around 197, the Jewish community pooled resources behind its wealthiest money lenders and constructed stone buildings for their business, designed to safely store the money of clients and conduct exchanges in greater privacy. With most of the local market moving inside them, the facilities became a nexus for the interaction between Jews and the friendlier Roman citizens, who took up tuta banca (safe bench) as a term for what were functionally banking establishments. A short time later, a handful of these banks serviced the demand of over a hundred thousand local Jews and mediated commerce with several thousand nearby citizens.

Milestones
Although the turn of the century in the Anno Domini calendar went unnoticed, this event marked the rise of the global population above a record 260 million people. Around a fourth of this total lived within the Roman Empire, matched only by China, where the population was in decline from a period of instability. For people inside, the limites (borders) of the empire were regarded as the physical boundaries of civilization, with the view that the rest of the world was consumed by tyranny and barbarism. The city of Rome was an enormous metropolis of 800,000 citizens supported by their 500,000 slaves. Slavery sustained a higher standard of living for citizens in the capital, performing menial tasks for the citizens of Rome.

Pyrrhonism
While Stoicism was strongly favored by the emperor and gaining popularity in Rome, the other Greek schools of thought were growing on their own. One such group was the revived school of Pyrrhonism (or Skepticism) founded two centuries earlier by Aenesidemus. Pyrrhonian Skepticism relied on the principle of epoché (suspended judgement) - namely, any non-evident belief can be opposed with equal weight by a contrary belief. Pyrrhonists reasoned that since there is no way of deciding between two mutually exclusive, non-evident beliefs (without an arbitrary decision at some stage in the justification), there was no way to reach firm conclusions about nature or morals (only logic consisted of self-evident propositions). As a benefit to himself, the Skeptic also achieved a lasting peace of mind by not emotionally investing or committing to any specific ideologies or beliefs.

Support for Pyrrhonism grew after the physician Sextus Empiricus completed his Outlines of Pyrrhonism around 200 CE, a most perspicuous presentation of the pros of Pyrrhonism and a meticulous exposition of its methods. Sextus presented the ten modes or arguments for withholding judgement, drawing on the diversity of animals, mankind, senses, circumstances, and customs in the world. The treatise includes a thorough contrast of Skepticism with the Heracleitian, Cyrenaic, Democritean, Protagorean, and Platonic schools of thought. This contrast is accompanied by a brief discussion of the Galenic school of medicine and how its marriage of the Empiric and Dogmatic schools of medicine has unfortunately overshadowed Sextus' own Methodic school.

Notable contributions that Sextus made to epistemology were his criticism of induction, especially as used by Aristotle, and his use of regressive arguments against positive assertions, showing that they require justification ad infinitum. Later skeptics almost universally refer to his Outlines as an inspiration for their views, citing similar arguments for their own suspensions of judgement. Although little was made of Sextus' work in his day, it became the basis for more modern philosophical turns of thought.

Expansion (201-210)
201  was the year Sulla assembled five legions of his veterans from Germania and Parthia for an expedition in Britannia. His target: Caledonia  ( Scotland ).

Sulla was determined to curb the growing pressure from Picts outside Hadrian's Wall and was convinced that the only permanent solution was annexation. Nearly 26,000 legionaries, 70,000 auxilia, 4,000 sagittarii, and the famous general Pescennius Niger, veteran of the Parthian War, made up Sulla's forces. Their strategy was as ruthless as it was effective: exterminate the local people "with discretion". To weaken the native population and facilitate the creation of Roman colonies, Sulla occasionally selected an isolated village which he would order his men to encircle and slowly close in upon the settlement, killing everyone along the way, except the children who would either be left to die of exposure or be brought to nearby villages by legionaries and given to families with the story that wild men had killed their families. Not another soul would be allowed to escape the villages destroyed in this manner, bordering on a genocidal treatment of the Caledonian population.

At other villages, the legionaries only fought in self-defense but were still firm with the locals, with the occasional exception of men who took their liberty with people's possessions or had their way with local women. By 204, the legions had passed the Antonine Wall and were facing less resistance. The rest of the isle was conquered by 206. Accounts vary of the devastation but the most reliable estimates are that nearly a tenth of the native population was killed. The fiction about roving wild men remained the official story after annexation, being entered into the history books. By the end of the next century, no one doubted that the Romans had liberated Caledonia from dangerous Picts and had stayed to rebuild the area under a prosperous Roman authority. The true story has only been discovered through the accounts of legionaries who shared the tale back home.

Despite this impression, several thousand natives were taken as slaves during the conquest of Caledonia. As with other slaves, these people retained certain rights under Roman masters. They could complain in court of mistreatment by their masters and killing a slave was as much homicide as killing any non-citizen. Most of the new slaves that were captured got sold to patricians, who as a whole now owned over half of all slaves in the empire.

Praetorian reforms
For continued service to the Caesar, Gaius Fulvius Plautianus was named Praetorian Prefect in 203. Under his leadership, insurrection became intolerable and the Praetorian Guard went from an administrative body and army in Rome to a force that would dedicate itself solely to protecting its emperor. However, a short crisis resulted from guards protesting an announcement in 204 that donatives were not to be expected from future emperors but they were repelled from the palace by more loyal guards. After this event, Sulla had Plautianus split the guard into cohortes of 500 guards, each led by a single praetorian prefect. There would be no higher office for the guard, with each prefect reporting directly to the emperor himself. Under Sulla, there would be 20 cohortes in the Guard that he generally spread around the city of Rome as a secondary police force alongside the vigiles (watchmen) and the cohortes urbanae (urban riot police).

These Plautian reforms of the Guard balanced its leadership and had the different members constantly receiving new orders so that they were not performing the same task for any long period of time. Often, Sulla would send his guardsmen with magistrates traveling to the farther reaches of the empire, setting a precedent for how future emperors would use the Guard.

While reforming the Praetorian Guard secured Rome from the bloodshed suffered by past emperors, the fire of the last decade revealed a structural flaw. Most domae and insulae were made of flimsy wood, brick or rubble - vulnerable to catching fire and crumbling when they do. Buildings constructed after the fire were made to much higher standards of solidity and inflammability but much of the city was poorly built. From 203 onwards, the Senate filled yearly quotas for subsidies or loans to any citizen of Rome who requested renovation of his home. 19,000 insulae were improved to meet higher safety standards over the remainder of the emperor's reign, supplementing the improved quality of houses rebuilt after the fire.

Sitting on combined treasuries of 96 million denarii, Sulla revalued the three primary currencies again in 209. The denarius was lifted to 3.57 grams of silver in a larger 3.95 grams coin, giving a silver purity of 90.4%. Roman currency had not been this strong since the time of Augustus and this strength was further reinforced by outlawing the minting of coins outside Rome itself. While precious metallic coins were already minted in Rome alone, moneyers for lower denomination currencies had a tendency to apply their art to the skimming of more valuable coins and the counterfeit minting of new coins using the skimmed metal. By forcing all moneyers out of business that worked outside the supervision of the Senate, Sulla mitigated the likelihood of counterfeit coinage in the long-run. Larger minting operations were established on Tiber Island, alongside the means to disseminate these coins to the rest of the empire. By the end of his reign, Sulla had created a minting industry that matched the old decentralized system in output and left little ability for people to mint counterfeit currency.

Bearing the responsibility of minting bronze coinage was bothersome to the Roman Senate since it was accustomed to only minting its own currency when engaged in public spending or paying soldiers' wages. However, the centralization of the money supply was widely regarded as a practical move and was a comfort to many senators, despite reservations that the situation was logistically untenable. Fortunately, fears that Rome could not sustain this level of minting and distribution never came to fruition.

Stoicism
Popularity of the Reflections of Marcus Aurelius, as the public had come to call his memoirs, reached an early zenith while the emperor was campaigning in Caledonia. Many in the Senate had read the book by this time. It had gained a substantial following among patricians, some seeking closer ties with their Stoic emperor and others genuinely professing Stoicism. The spread of the Reflections was aided by a Latin translation by Lucius Septimius Severus in 201 CE which was widely read in Italy by both patricians and equestrians.

Sulla personally had no time to waste contemplating the cosmos or the nature of virtue. His Stoicism was entirely handed down from his adopted father and as far as he was concerned, was in no need of improvement. However, he respected the efforts of Stoic academics and wanted other Romans to follow Stoic doctrine, likely out of a genuine belief that it would help the people deal with life's hardships as opposed to an attempt to render the populace more passive to imperial rule. To this end, Sulla paid for the construction of the magnificent Stoa Erudimena near the Tiber in Rome. The collected works of Stoics from Zeno to Epictetus were copied for the new academy's libraries and dozens of the most educated Stoics were brought from the original Stoa in Athens to teach and converse here in Rome. The academy featured a wide porch, overlooking a stunning garden, from which lectures on Stoic metaphysics and ethics were given almost weekly to the public.

There were mixed receptions to the intricacies of Stoicism. Patricians with even a modicum of capacity for reason noticed a dissonance between the Stoic belief in an immanent, single divinity and Roman polytheism. For a time, many were assuaged by the interpretation of this God as Nature, a product of the true gods. Nevertheless, the incompatibility of Stoicism with polytheism would be an ideological ticking time-bomb, going off in slow waves for the next century and moving the elite of Rome in short leaps toward the growing monotheistic cult coming out of Judaea. The spread of Stoicism among patricians was a turning point in the history of Christianity, producing different demographic shifts than without the prevalence of this philosophy.

Furthermore, Stoicism continued to influence Roman attitudes toward slavery. Stoic morals considered all humans equal and although it did not advocate abolition of slavery, as a deeply-rooted institution of civilization, Stoics supported improving the treatment of slaves. This belief ultimately influenced the laws that were passed by Sulla.

Stoicism would enjoy academic dominance in Italy and eventually in Hispania and Gaul for the next two centuries before being supplanted by Aristotelianism during the rebirth of Greek culture in the fifth century. In Greece itself, the Stoics were even with the Aristotelians and Atomists as the only philosophies with central schools. Atomism enjoyed a brief height in popularity from the Latin writings of Lucretius, but its decline has been consistent since the death of Virgil, its last great proponent.

Roman agriculture
Since the reign of Augustus, agriculture had shifted from the landholding peasant to landed estates owned by the aristocracy. Gradually, the latifundium (landed estate) had grown into the primary form of agriculture in the empire, with most agrarian land held by a relatively small number of citizens. By the end of the first century alone, over half of Africa Proconsularis was in the hands of just six wealthy landowners and the situation was only becoming more severe over time.

When this problem was only in the provinces, Sulla was not bothered by these inequalities. It was the decline of plebeian farming in Italy, forcing displaced farmers into cities and creating a growing number of unemployed plebs in the capital that relied on the grain dole, that called him to action against the latifundia. At the time, the treasury could economically support these squatters but Sulla feared the worst should food become scarce. With the echoes of the ancient warnings of Pliny in his ear, Sulla spent tens of millions of denarii on buying latifundia in Italy to loan to members of the plebeian order on contract. In other words, poor residents of the capital entered into an agreement with the state wherein they would work a plot of ager publicus (public land) but give a large fraction of their harvests to Rome. These contracts served both to provide more public grain for the dole in Rome and to reduce the numbers of poor urban citizens depending on that grain.

The importance of a landholding peasantry in Italy was emphasized by the emperor to his adopted son, setting a precedent that his successors would continue for two centuries. His strategy of buying latinfundia and only leasing the land to peasants had the large advantage of preventing the resale of the farms to the nobility, since plebs were more likely to acquiesce to patrician demands. The eventual selling of the land back to patricians by less competent emperors is made all the more sad by the success of this program.

These sharecroppers would be treated with special care by some emperors after Sulla. Measures were put into place by Sulla's son to enforce strict two-field crop rotation and by his grandson to provide mechanical reapers to peasants who could not afford them. Unfortunately, this program only curtailed the eventual population collapse that was inevitable with the rising population of Italy.

A project initiated by Sulla to drain the Lacus Fucinus  opened more than 14,000 acres of arable land for the state to lease to the urban poor. This massive effort built on the work of Caesar Hadrianus, who had drained the lake to its size at the time. Sulla only had his engineers finish the job. The plains on the former lake were some of the most fertile land in Italy and over a century, also became famous as a symbol of the  public land due to its unique and stunning topography for farmland. Also, numerous regulations were enforced upon the use of land on the  Fucinus, in an effort to maintain its fertility, acting as a barrier to future efforts to sell the land to patricians as happened to most of the public land in Italy.

Consolidation (211-220)
The emperor passed the Constitutio Sulla (Edict of Sulla) in 212 CE. The core of the edict  was the dissolution of the  Latin Right  as a mediate stage in acquiring full citizenship. After the edict, free residents of the empire could only be distinguished as cives (citizens) and peregrini (non-citizens), leaving a clearer legal and cultural delineation between Romans and non-Romans. People of the latter group were administered under ius gentium (law of nations or international law) and only encountered the ius civile (civil law) of the Romans in their interactions with citizens. As part of the edict, people who possessed the ius latinum (latin right) were granted full citizenship and contemporary libertini (freedmen) received the same. Furthermore, every free resident of Epirus and Achaia was made a citizen of Rome, bringing Greece deeper into the affairs of Roman society.

Although hundreds of thousands of people acquired citizenship through the edict, some sections placed new restrictions on future acquisitions of citizenship. Manumission no longer gave the freed man any form of citizenship and left the children of former slaves only as free non-citizens. However, a libertinus benefited from lower taxes compared with other peregrini. In addition, a term of service as a military auxiliary would no longer confer citizenship but service in its cohorts would offer higher wages than before. Lastly, the tax on non-citizens - a poll tax known as the Tributum - was raised closer to the rate of taxes on citizens while the ius commercii (property rights) afforded only to citizens were extended to all free people living within the empire.

In effect, the edict abolished all means of acquiring citizenship without having a citizen as a father or receiving citizenship as a gift directly from the Senate. The result was a more static base of cives romani and a marginally greater equality between citizens and free non-citizens. The only way to get citizenship other than naturalization or dispensation was to have been adopted by a male citizen before reaching two years of age (an older non-citizen could not legally be adopted by a Roman citizen).

Not all parts of the edict pertained to the acquisition of citizenship. Brief sections created a new tax on the manumission of slaves, proportional to the original price of the slave and raised the minimum age for freeing a slave from 30 to 40 years. At the same time, higher minimum standards for the treatment of slaves were instituted, including lower prices on giving medical care to slaves and restrictions on selling slaves, i.e. limiting the sale of slaves to public slave markets with permits. Part of the additional medical care for slaves encouraged the bearing of children, providing a larger supply of vernae (born slaves).

After his edict, Sulla reinforced Augustan marriage laws - raising taxes on the lifestyle of bachelors and offering priviliges such as lower taxes and housing subsidies to married citizens. In the capital, a male citizen could accept 15 denarii each year for ten years after the birth of any child. More restrictive marriage laws were passed that prohibited marriage between different class of society, especially the marriage of citizens with non-citizens and of the nobilitas (upper class) with the plebes (lower class). Some people protested to the emperor that the laws were too draconian but he justified them to the public on the grounds that they followed the judgements of the Divine Augustus and protected the traditional values of the Roman household.

Banking in Rome
Meanwhile, the bancae in Aelia Capitolina inspired the richer money lenders in Antioch, Petra, and some minor colonies to expend the capital required to move their businesses to secure, temple-like buildings. In many cases, these facilities were only storehouses for clients' coin and the lenders continued to run their service on a bench in the local marketplace. However, the security, intimacy, and privacy of doing business in a bank appealed to many clients and the buildings became popular replacements for the benches, as they were in Aelia Capitolina due to more prevalent threats to the money changers.

Sulla caught wind of the growing prominence of banks in the eastern provinces and sought money lenders in Rome to build one of their own on the Insula Tiberina (Tiber Island). Although far from the markets, this bank was popular and inspired another group of money lenders to found their own in the Mercatus Traiani (Trajan's Market). Finally, in 219, the Senate commissioned its own facility on a spot beside the Temple of Harmony, marked overhead with "TUTA BANCA ROMAE/APOTHECA NUMMAE SPQR". Locals simply referred to the institution as the Banca Romae. This magnificent structure was even longer than the Basilica Julia but presented a small facade to the Roman Forum, with most of its length stretching farther back than the Tabularium. In other words, it became one of the most prominent structures in the city.

Under order of the emperor, the office of Praefectus Argentarius (Overseer of the Silver) was instituted to manage the bank and supervise its other argentarii (bankers). His role was to personally attend to clients of the Banca Romae in a manner that mirrored the traditional relationship of a wealthy patron with his clients. Equipped to store more than a billion denarii, this bank served a completely separate purpose as the nearby Temple of Saturn, where some funds for the aerarium (national treasury) were kept.

From a cultural standpoint, the banks in the capital had a visual prominence and authenticity that heavily distinguished them from the benches of money lenders. Starting with the Banca Romae, the Senate began the practice of endorsing banks and by 268, outlawed banks in Italy that did not have the endorsement of the Senate. In general, endorsement came with the requirement that banks follow the lead of the Banca Romae, particularly in their interest rates. Respect for these institutions grew as they became more prominent, numerous, and encouraged by senators. A slow trend of common citizens taking out loans from banks, in place of requesting patronage from a wealthy citizen, started shortly after the Senate began its program of endorsement.

Rule Britannia
During the same decade as his edict, Sulla devoted more of his time and energy to the Romanization of the domain of Britannia. With the whole island under his control, he seized the opportunity to issue propaganda that played on the idea of a Roman Britain and on the unity of the region. In particular, he commissioned public works of art portraying Britannia - a beautiful figure modeled after the goddess Minerva and wearing a centurion helmet. In contrast to earlier art, these depictions portrayed Britannia as a free and strong woman, accompanied by a wolf or a legionary in an amicable context. Hundreds of statues were carved for plazas and temples throughout the isle, emphasizing a beneficial relationship with Rome.

At the center of public works in the island was Londinium. A temple to Divus Claudius was built on its forum followed shortly by the Banca Britannica, an institution that would control interest rates throughout the south of the province. A galenaria was built on the west of the rivulet that went down the center of the city, bringing a kind of medicine unknown to the local population. Since the governor of the province was a military commander, Sulla sought to bring the provincial administration closer to the locals by building a provincial villa, where the governor would live and receive guests in a more open fashion. In this way, the people of the city and, by extension, nearby rural Britons, would be less conscious of the military nature of being governed. Elsewhere in the province, dozens of banks and hospitals were established alongside Roman temples to further Romanize the populace.

To the north, the Antonine Wall was cannibalized to renovate Hadrian's Wall, which was intended to serve as the formal border between the provinces of Britannia and Caledonia, after the latter became an imperial province in 208. A 541 km road now went from Londinium to Eboracum and continued beyond the wall. Although locals saw a benefit to trade, the legions in the area were the primary audience as they could now easily move between the northern and southern reaches of the island. Furthermore, the expansion and renovation of the main highway facilitated construction in the north using stone from quarries in the south.

Over the next two centuries, the island of Britannia saw increasing integration with the rest of the Roman Empire. Although denied direct access to the Mediterranean, Britain began to participate heavily in trade with the Gallic provinces and became indispensable for its iron and coal. Features of Roman culture and civilization, such as hypocausts and baths, were ubiquitous in most towns by the end of the 3rd century and by the 5th century, most of the population spoke a dialect of Latin. However, aspects of the local culture persisted in the form of an elite variation on earlier Celtic dialects from the south of the island and in the household rituals of most commoners. For this reason, Britain was one of the last regions of the empire to accept new religious traditions.

At the same time, the last of the foederati (vassal kingdom) in Britain were only dissolved in 321 with the dissolution of the special status of the Votadini, bringing them under the authority of the governor of Caledonia. Although some small enclaves of Druids and their kin still existed far away from Roman settlements, this transition marked the end of independent rule in Britain.

Foreign contact
Beyond the Dacian frontiers, Gothic tribes were gathering in large numbers, making themselves known to Rome by attempting several invasions starting in 220. Although their first assault achieved early successes, they were repulsed within two years and the Senate resolved to counter the growing threat by building defensive walls along the frontiers. Nearly 960 km of heavy stone and mortar walls were built, stretching from Lauriacum to Aquincum, bolstering the defenses of the limes danuvius. At the same time, Rome lent military support to the local Alani - an Iranian culture inhabiting the lands around the Pontus Euxinus (Black Sea) - to encourage co-operation against the Goths, assisted further by the Bosporan kingdom that served Rome as a vassal.

Although the Goths would remain nearby for some time, the support of the Alani would strengthen Alanic presence among the other local Sarmatian tribes and ensure the dominance of their culture over the Goths. In general, the Vesigothic culture resulted from the intermingling of Goths and Alans over the course of the following two centuries, whereas the Ostrogothic culture were the more northern descendants of the Goths, receiving less influence from Roman and Sarmatian cultures.

In the same year as the first invasion, a delegation arrived in Egypt from a kingdom in India, asking to meet the fabled king of the Hellenic world. News of its arrival reached Sulla, who decided to reaffirm direct trade with the Indians and to circumvent Persia as a mediary for eastern commerce. The delegates entered Rome to a fanfare instigated by the equites of Roman society. No one had ever met an Indian or anyone from the Far East for that matter, and anyone who could afford guests was enthusiastic about dining with these strange visitors. At the same time, Sulla had people search for citizens who had dealt with Indians before, finding a gnostic Christian by the name of Bardaisan. Despite his beliefs, this man was suitable for the purposes of the emperor.

From conversation, Romans learned that the delegation had come from the Kingdom of Andhra on behalf of its ruler. Within the year, the delegates were returning with deals for their king and were accompanied by Bardaisan as a legatus indicus (envoy to India) - the first ambassador of Rome to an Indian kingdom. Roman influence on the Andhra would be larger than on any other eastern nation, although it did not amount to much. Several hundred ships left ports such as Aelana, Berenice, and Myos Hormos each year to trade with the Orient, amounting to nearly 70 million denarii worth of goods leaving the empire. In return, Roman and foreign merchants brought hundreds of millions of denarii worth of exotic goods to Egypt and Arabia Petraea (keeping in mind that these values denote the worth of goods within the empire alone).

Later rule (221-228)
In reaction to the Indian delegation, Sulla sent soldiers as envoys to the Far East, travelling as merchants to discover and carefully appropriate the source of Asiatic silk. Some minor trade agreements were made with the Chinese Emperor of Wei but the main goal was to steal living silkworms. Alongside a hundred pounds of the worms, Chinese sericulturalists were kidnapped and forced to instruct Romans in the care of the worms and the extraction of their silk. By this means, Rome became the second culture to break the Chinese monopoly on the international silk trade, opening a handful of silk farms on ager publicus in Egypt. A market for Egyptian silk started from here to compete with Chinese and Indian silk.

However, Sulla had the Senate pass laws that restricted the transport of silk within the empire. All silk from the Egyptian farmers would go straight to the capital, where the only lawful facilities for processing silk were situated. Although foreign silk did not face this restriction, it ensured that the best weaving and processing happened in Rome, effectively diverting the entire market for silk through the Eternal City. Unfortunately for Rome, silk from Egypt had inferior quality to Chinese silk, as a result of a number of factors such as climate and skill. Nevertheless, Egyptian silk became a slightly cheaper alternative to true, eastern silk.

Other kingdoms were not performing nearly as spectacularly as the Roman Empire during this period. After a period of instability, the Chinese Empire of Han had just fractured, leaving behind a number of smaller kingdoms that squabbled over its lands. The Regnum Bospori (Bosporan Kingdom) had its own problems with the Gothic tribes that had attempted to invade Roman Dacia. Without much interest from Rome, Bosporan civilization collapsed by 255 under the combined weight of the Alans (who were taking advantage of having Rome's favor) and the Goths.

At the same time, the Parthians were suffering from a loss of land and authority to their enemy - the Sassanids that had emerged from the eastern fringes around 208 CE. From their fortress of Ardashir-Khwarrah, the Sassanids, or Sasanians as Romans knew them, slowly tore Parthia apart from the inside, culminating in the death of the empire in 224 when the Sasanians took power in the land of Eran (Eranshahr). Although the Parthian nobility were terrified by these events, the Senate of Rome received the news with an expected amount of excitement, calmly watching their centuries long rival collapse. Romans took pleasure in the notion that "mighty Persia" had fallen while Rome was stronger than ever before.

Public games were held in Rome to celebrate the fall of the Parthian Empire. For his part, Shahanshah Ardashir of Sasan had no desire to challenge the western colossus that was the Roman Empire and politely negotiated trade and peace with the governor of the province of Syria. In 226, Sulla arranged a meeting with the Shah in Petra. The Shah wisely professed submissiveness to Rome and asked only that "[their] two kingdoms persist in peace". Sulla dismissed the notion that Rome was a "kingdom" and gave his assurance that the Persian people would one day enjoy the Pax Romana as Romans did. For the time being, he offered the Shah the status of foederatus (client kingdom) and after this was politely declined, he said that Persia would be allowed to exist under Sasanian rule by his grace. A parade through the streets of Aelia Capitolina as a gift for the Shah emphasized his point through the thundering of feet from tens of thousands of marching legionaries.

Prior to this meeting of giants, the Roman Empire was shook by an uprising in its western provinces. People were stirring up the local non-citizens of Hispania by spreading a different account of the Punic Wars in the Hispanic province of Tarraconensis. These public speeches and pamphlets described how the Carthaginians had defended th city of Saguntum against a surprise invasion by Rome and how the Romans used the battle with the defenders as an excuse to start the Second Punic War. Unrest struck that same city in 221, largely instigated by the Phoenician populace. The revolt was crushed by the Legion but minor unrest persisted in the region for another fifty years, spoiling an otherwise peaceful era in Roman history.

Indeed, Sulla had used his Triumph from the annexation of Caledonia as an opportunity to usher in an era of peace over his empire, only two decades after a massive war against Germanic tribes and a decade after defeating Persia. After the Triumph, there was a ceremonious closing of the Gates of Janus, starting a procession that ended at the Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace). These ceremonies signaled the start of a proper period of peace, with few conflicts involving the Legion from 206 to 233. Even more, the years to come were a golden era for the empire, when the leadership of Rome was firmly established and the military strength of Rome over her enemies was undoubted. The two national treasuries stayed steady, the population rose, and trade between the provinces boomed. In particular, recent developments in medicine marked the start of a persistent natural increase in the numbers of citizens relative to the other people living within the empire (since citizens benefited from inexpensive medicine).

This period was a time for civil reform. In 222 and 225 respectively, the provinces of Alpes Ulterior and Aquitania were converted to proconsular provinces, as was Lycia in 227. The shift allowed the strategic relocation of multiple legions in the direction of more treacherous borders and signaled to the people of Rome that their empire was stabilizing. A more widespread sentiment that Rome was settling permanently into her territory began to spread during the golden age of Sulla the Great.

In 212, the city of Colonia Corellia was founded in honor of the emperor on a confluence of the Fluvius Clota (River Clyde). As the first colonia of Caledonia, Corellia was slowly settled by Roman citizens from Gallia (France) and Italy. Immigration to the new city was encouraged by the cheap cost of land and lower taxes than in other provinces. Over the next century, Corellia would grow rapidly and receive much of the infrastructure expected of a Roman colony (galenariae, templa, statuae, etc.). In addition to a temple to Mars, the colonists erected temples to Sulla, Marcus Aurelius, and Hadrian.

Death
On January 1, 228, Caesar Sulla - who received the cognomen Magnus in 225 - collapsed during a speech in the Senate. The stroke he was suffering, despite his good health, was incurable even by Rome's best medici and ultimately, the leader of the civilized world passed away late that evening.

A grand state funeral was held on January 4th, in stark contrast to Marcus Aurelius' modest private one, to coincide with the public mourning of tens of millions of people - the entire Western world - and to lay the emperor to rest with his ancestors in the Mausoleum Hadriani. On January 5th, the adopted Marcus Antoninus Sulla was formally recognized as Caesar of Rome.

Statistics for the Roman Empire of 228 AD
Population: 69 million people (26.0% of global population), including ~8 million slaves

Area: 5,840,000 km2

GDP: 4.9 billion denarii (~$49 billion US)

Treasury: 79 million denarii (~$790 million US)

Government revenue: 274 million denarii (~$2.74 billion US), 5.6% of GDP

Military spending: 157 million denarii (57% of revenue or 3.2% of GDP)

Military size: 156,000 legionaries (30 legions), ~227,000 auxiliaries, and 10,000 praetorian guards