Rome: An Empire's Story (15 page)

Comprehending Empire

Looking at Roman expansion in terms of the comparative advantages of its institutions makes good sense to us, as it did to the Greek Polybius. Like
him, we are heirs to a style of political analysis that goes back to Aristotle. But it is worth asking how the Romans comprehended this extraordinary story. A rich example is provided by one family that did more than most to lead Rome over these centuries.

The Cornelii were one of the largest of the clans out of which the Republican aristocracy, or rather its inner circle, was comprised. The Cornelii Scipiones comprised one section of the clan. The family is well known from historical writing and would be famous even if their rock-cut tomb had not been found beside the Appian Way leading out of Rome and excavated in the late eighteenth century. The tomb contains nine sarcophagi—there would once have been many more—each with an epitaph. As it happens these fill out parts of the family tree least well known from the narratives of Polybius and Livy. The family was of patrician status, which Romans sometimes understood to mean descendants of the aristocracy of the Regal Period. By the third century patrician families no longer monopolized high political office or the great priesthoods, but they were certainly over-represented in them.

The eldest of those whose epitaphs were found in the tomb, Scipio Barbatus, was consul in 298
BC
, his two sons were consuls in 260 and 258, and one held a rare second consulship in 254. The next generation held consulships in 222, 221, and 218 and their children in 205, 191, 190, and 176. The consul of 205 was the victor of Zama, the battle that had ended the second Punic war. He took the name Scipio Africanus and held a second consulship in 194. Through his influence his brother was consul in 190 and led the war against Antiochus, for which he took the title Asiaticus. These continental nicknames accurately express the scale of their reputations, or egos.

Livy tells the story of how, late in life, Africanus was tried before the people for corruption. On the second day of the trial he was summoned before the tribunes. He approached them where they were seated on the Rostra at one end of the Roman forum, accompanied by a great crowd of his friends and clients. Silence fell, and he addressed them

On this very day, tribunes of the people and you too my fellow citizens, I fought a battle against Hannibal and the Carthaginians, with good fortune and with success. So, since it seems reasonable that all cases and procedures be suspended for today, I am going at once from here up onto the Capitol to praise Jupiter the Greatest and Best, to Juno, to Minerva and to the other gods who preside on the Capitol and the Citadel. And I will thank them that on this very day, and on other occasions, they gave me the strength and wisdom to do great service to the state. Citizens, those of you who are able, come with me and pray to the gods that you may always have leaders like myself. For from time when I was seventeen years old right up to my old age you have always given me honours appropriate to men older than myself, and I have always anticipated your honours by my deeds.
¹⁷

Fig 5.
The sarcophagus of Scipio Barbatus, Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican

The court rose, the story goes, and followed him in a tour of the temples of the city. Maybe it is a fiction, and Africanus seems to have lived his last
years in a voluntary exile in Liternum on the Bay of Naples, so perhaps he did not get off scot free. But the anecdote tells us how he was remembered.

The next generation of the Scipiones was not so distinguished, although one was consul as late as 138. But the name was unstoppable. By adopting the son of another great family, the Aemilii Pauli one of whom had destroyed the Macedonian kingdom in 168, the family recruited Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus: he served as consul in 147 and commanded the force that finally destroyed Carthage once and for all, a second Africanus. As a statesman and a patron of the arts, he was idealized by Cicero as guiding the state during the years before civil war became endemic.

Family traditions are created by remembering, and memory is always selective. The epitaphs in the tomb were particularly susceptible to this process, but for what it is worth the image that emerges is a consistent one.
¹⁸
Each of the Scipiones is praised for personal qualities—often beauty as well as virtue—and some at least of their offices are listed, but the great field of achievement is war. Barbatus won wars against Etruscans and Samnites and subdued all of Lucania in the south of the peninsula. As well as the consulship he was elected censor and held the most prestigious priesthood in Rome, the position of
pontifex maximus
. His son, the consul of 259, also made censor. His victories were naval ones, conquering almost all of Corsica from the Carthaginians. On his return he set up a temple to the goddesses of the storms. His brother triumphed in 253 after capturing the city of Panormus in Sicily. And on and on. The consul of 222 led the conquest of Milan and the Gallic tribe of the Insubres whose capital it was. His son was selected in 204 as the noblest Roman citizen and so the best suited to welcome the arrival of the Great Mother Goddess from Asia Minor when her cult statue was brought to Rome. He too had his victories over the Gauls. Successive victories were won further and further afield, the honours expressed in the same words generation after generation. From our perspective, we see the profound structural changes Rome underwent as it moved from an aggressive Italian city-state to ruler of the Mediterranean. But for the Cornelii Scipiones—and doubtless too for the Fabii Maximi, the Sempronii Gracchi, and all those other great families that rivalled them, married into them, and told the same story of Rome with only slightly different inflections—their family history formed part, a leading part, of a narrative of conquest that lasted for centuries.

Further Reading

William Harris’s
War and Imperialism in Republican Rome
(Oxford, 1979) changed the way Roman imperialism is discussed, moving attention from Roman justifications for wars to the political, social, and ideological factors driving expansion. The Roman takeover of the Greek east is chronicled in Erich Gruen’s
Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome
(Berkeley, 1984). Arthur Eckstein’s
Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War and the Rise of Rome
(Berkeley, 2006) offers an interpretation based on political science. Graham Shipley’s
The Greek World after Alexander
(London, 2000) is a marvellous guide to the world that Rome destroyed. John Richardson discusses Rome’s less glamorous, but enormously significant, first experiments in imperialism in the west in
Hispaniae
(Cambridge, 1986).

Modern debates over the domestic consequences of Roman overseas expansion begin from Peter Brunt’s
Italian Manpower
(Oxford, 1971). The first chapters of Keith Hopkins’s
Conquerors and Slaves
(Cambridge, 1978) present a lucid argument relating imperialism to the growth of slavery and the expansion of the city of Rome. But the demography has recently come under renewed scrutiny. Excellent starting points for this debate are Nathan Rosenstein’s
Rome at War
(Chapel Hill, NC, 2004) and a collection of papers edited by Luuk de Ligt and Simon Northwood under the title
People, Land and Politics
(Leiden, 2008).

VI
SLAVERY AND EMPIRE

Aiming to reconcile a population that was scattered and primitive—so quick to take up arms—to a peaceful and leisured existence by providing luxurious amenities, he gave private encouragement and public assistance to them to build temples, market places and urban mansions, praising those who were quick to do so, and criticizing those who were slow. This way a competition for honour took the place of compulsion. He provided the sons of the chiefs with a proper education, and he praised the natural aptitude of the Britons over the hard work of the Gauls, so those who had refused to learn Latin, began to acquire oratorical skills. Even our national style of dress became popular; the toga was often to be seen. And little by little they were led towards those things that encourage vice, colonnades, bathing and elegant banquets. In their inexperience they took all this for civilization; in fact it was part of their enslavement.

(Tacitus,
Agricola
21)

A Patrimonial Empire

Every empire bears the mark of the kind of society that creates it. Nomad empires like that of the Mongols ruled through tribes and clans. The British Empire began as a trading venture, was conquered and governed by members of the aristocracy, and was administered by a colonial bureaucracy staffed from the professional middle-classes.
¹
Each of these social groups left
its mark on the empire. Republican Rome was a city-state run by its greatest families. It was also a slave-owning society. It is no surprise that the empire it created was aristocratic, and that it depended for its management on the family and on slavery.

Family and slavery might seem an odd combination today. But in many pre-modern societies the two were fitted closely together.
²
Many economic and governmental functions that are in the modern world organized by corporations, companies, and bureaucracies of various kinds were in the past mostly managed by individuals, who relied for help on networks of families and friends, ‘kith and kin’. Perhaps the most basic economic activity in antiquity is farming, whether that of tribal cultivators who organizing their work through ideologies of kinship, or that of peasant families. Slavery appeared in both kinds of society as a means of supplementing the workforce. Typically it appeared alongside friendship and clientage: slaves provided labour all the year round, others might help for particular needs. The aristocratic rulers of mid-Republican Rome had much more to organize than their family estates. Some owned several farms, others buildings in the city, trading vessels, potteries, and small shops. No one had enough relatives to staff or manage all these ventures. Wage labour existed, but it was rarely used, and mostly for piecework. Military aggression made the growth of slavery possible, and the more complex society that resulted from expansion generated new roles that slaves could fill. Roman property owners—and slaves were property of course—made use of slavery in every possible capacity. Slaves worked in the fields and the mines, served at table and in the bedroom, were teachers, financial managers, and
confidants.
Romans famously freed many of their slaves and gave them a limited form of citizenship. The reason was not sentimental: the slaves who were freed were generally the most skilled, and as ex-slaves or freedmen they remained closely tied to the houses of their former masters. By the end of the Republic a great part of the city consisted of grand houses, each of which might include hundreds of slaves, and around them a penumbra of former slaves still closely tied to their former masters. Most Roman aristocrats spent only a small part of their lives in public service, as generals or governors or other officials: while on service their family, friends, and former slaves assisted them. The state owned a few slaves, but— until the emperors expanded their own family and slave household to form the kernel of a civil service—the empire was governed patrimonially, than is by the kith, kin, and slaves of its leading members.

The family also generated powerful images of authority, images which were easily transferred to other spheres. The ideological focus was the
paterfamilias
, the normal head of the household. Roman fathers were imagined to exercise benevolent care and moral leadership as well as authority. Formally, the Roman
paterfamilias
owned all the property of those persons under his authority, a group that included his adult children, the children of his sons, their slaves and ex-slaves. He also exercised a kind of guardianship over his female relatives, and even his married daughters remained under his authority. The
paterfamilias
was magistrate and priest in his own household, representing it to the state and to the gods. He presided over the family cult, might convene a council of his friends to help him decide on family matters, and might turn this into a family court to try members of the household: until Augustus even adultery was a matter for the jurisdiction of the head of the household. Slaves might be subjected to beatings at his command, or set free: ex-slaves might in principle be re-enslaved. Recent research on the Roman family has shown that reality was more complex. For a start, the idea of most adult males being completely under the thumb of an aged
paterfamilias
has to be rejected for all periods of Roman history. In a world where men typically did not marry for the first time until their late twenties and where life expectancy was at pre-modern levels, many adult Romans will have had no living parents. Those old men who did survive were treated with enormous respect: the situation was closer to traditional Japanese and Chinese society than to that of western Europe today. Tales of antique severity were part of a general tendency of Roman writers to evoke a morally stable past when attacking individuals in the present. Yet this myth made the Pater an excellent figure with which to represent benevolent authority in other contexts. Senators were formally addressed as
patres conscripti.
The title
pater patriae
(father of the fatherland) was given to Cicero, to Caesar, and then to Augustus after whom it became a standard component of imperial titulature.