Rome: An Empire's Story (6 page)

It is an obvious point to make, perhaps, but these polities had almost nothing in common. Nor do they correspond very well, in any age, to the list of imperial powers we might draw up on other criteria. The British, by most estimates, ruled an empire (or perhaps two) long before Victoria was persuaded to take the title. Spain was clearly an early modern empire, whether or not the ruling Hapsburg happened to be emperor. On the other hand, these claims cannot be dismissed entirely as megalomaniac fantasies. What we are observing is the enduring power of Roman models of empire to fascinate, especially at moments of intense competition for precedence. When monarchies vied for prestige, they reached for the eagles, the Latin titles, wreaths, and classicizing architecture. Their value was that they were instantly recognizable. Even Bokassa, as he seized power within the Central African Republic, demonstrated how well he had learned the symbolic language of European colonialism.

The revival of the language of empire in the modern age seems particularly surprising. Rivalry between European monarchies was clearly one factor. Perhaps there were simply not many alternative vocabularies to express the global differentials of power being created. But there were multiple local factors too. Napoleon’s empire was not just about dominion abroad, it was also about the working out of the Republican project within post-Revolutionary France. Victoria’s assumption of the title Empress of India was not just about rivalry with her German son-in-law, Kaiser Wilhelm: it may also have reflected a growing recognition of the national identity of India. The last Mughal (deposed by the British in 1858) had taken the Urdu title
Badishah-e-Hind
, which is often translated as Emperor of India. The Russian monarchs’ use of the Slavic term czar or tsar also evoked the guardianship of Orthodox Christianity.

Behind all this we can sense the emergence of a group of nation-states that regarded each other as in a league of their own, as great powers. Today, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, only three members of the
G8 and only one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council are still monarchies of any kind. But for much of the nineteenth century, all the leading nations had hereditary heads of state. The nineteenth century too was the high watermark of European interest in the classics, and especially in Rome. Perhaps it is not surprising that, by one route or another, so many of these monarchs became emperors, at least for a short while. The language and trappings of empire offered a way to express a sense that they were more than simply kings and queens, and that the nation-states over which they reigned were not ordinary nations.

Empire did not lose its charm until the middle of the twentieth century. One by one monarchies were abolished, or rendered peripheral. Communist states found Rome a less attractive model than had their predecessors. Fascism was the last major political movement to make use of Roman models. Mussolini’s imitation of Rome was the most explicit: as well as using Roman precedent to make a claim to Mediterranean hegemony, his party was named after the
fasces
, the bundle of rods surrounding an axe that was the symbol carried before a Roman magistrate. German Fascism too made much use of classical Roman imagery, especially in the architecture of the Third Reich.
¹⁶
After the Second World War the Japanese emperor was made to renounce his divinity, European empires were dismantled, and imperialism came to acquire a more and more pejorative sense. The British monarchy quietly put away the title after the end of the British Raj. Classical imagery was in any case less and less effective as the new professional and governing classes had less and less knowledge about Rome. ‘Imperialist’ became a term of abuse directed against colonial powers by newly independent peoples, and the label was used as a term of condemnation by all sides in the Cold War. Discussions of whether or not the USA is today an empire are rarely sympathetic towards American foreign policy.

The multiple afterlives of the Roman Empire are one reason for the enduring importance of Rome. But they can also obscure our vision of Rome itself. It is worthwhile considering some of the less obvious contrasts between Rome and her nineteenth-century imitators. For one thing, the Roman Empire admitted no equals and recognized no predecessor. There was no notion of a community of nations, no elite club of superpowers; the Romans were a single people over and against the rest. Not all of their subjects and neighbours saw things this way. But empire for Rome was novel and unique. Rome was restoring nothing, and the world empire it created seemed, for a while, without precedent.

Fig 2.
A Mercury Dime, depicting the Roman
fasces

Empire as a Category

The last notion of empire that I want to introduce is one the Romans would have found hard to credit. This is the idea that empire is a particular kind of political entity, one that has occurred on several occasions and in several locations in world history. This usage makes the term ‘empire’ into a timeless socio-historical category; the very opposite of a phenomenon with its own history.

We are all familiar, naturally, with the idea that ‘empire’ denotes a particular kind of thing. Alongside the Roman Empire we might want to set the British Empire, the New World empires of the Aztecs and Inkas, the Persians and the Assyrians in antiquity, the Spaniards in the early modern period, and so on. For everyday purposes, we associate empire with the conquest of other peoples or states, with grand capital cities and rich court ceremonial, with rule over a great swathe of territory, and with a leading place in historical narratives. Empires rise and fall, they dominate their neighbours, they gather exotic treasures from the edges of the earth, and claim to be at the centre of it. Empire evokes dreams of universal dominion: a Reich that lasts a thousand years, a flag the sun never sets on, a ruler who is a king of kings.

It turns out to be not so easy to develop more rigorous definitions. We can hardly rely on the rulers’ preferred description, which usually depended on local rivalries and whether the term would win or lose them support. Besides, what are we to do when we consider places outside those traditions
that placed Rome at its root? Most historians would agree that the Inka and the Chinese created empires comparable to those of Europe and the Middle East, yet how are we to decide which Quechua or Mandarin terms have the same semantic range as ‘empire’ or ‘emperors’? The ancients themselves did not always agree on what was or was not an empire. Roman emperors generally treated Persia as a lesser state, yet Persians on occasion addressed them as ‘brother emperors’.
¹⁷
The historical sociologist finds it especially difficult to distinguish small empires from large states, since most states are built on domination, and since only the tiniest states have no internal peripheries. Did the English ever exercise
imperial
rule over Wales and Ireland or over Scotland? That English governments dominated these regions is without doubt, but the language chosen to describe them was never imperial. Scots were eventually presented as partners in the British Empire. But was not this mere ideology, a device to disguise English hegemony and to claim that the inhabitants of Scotland were in some sense privileged relative to those of other subjected territories? Empires are certainly states, and there are certainly rulers and ruled. But there are also those subjects who join in conquering and ruling, both their own people and others. Scale ought to be a good criterion. But fixing the limit is impossible. The Bronze Age empires of Mesopotamia and the classical Athenian empire were tiny compared to those of Rome, Persia, and north India. Yet it would seem odd either to deny the title ‘empire’ to them, or alternatively to term virtually all the kingdoms of medieval and modern Europe imperial.

What most historians concerned with comparative analysis do is to divide up the term ‘empire’ into sub-categories, and to try to compare only like with like.
¹⁸
It makes sense, for example, to treat separately the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century European empires in which nation-states enjoyed brief control of distant regions with much weaker economies, largely through their technological superiority. Even within pre-industrial (or, if you prefer, pre-modern or pre-capitalist) empires, some comparisons seem hazardous. Can we really compare the maritime empire of early modern Portugal with the chronologically contemporaneous empires of the valley of Mexico, whose rulers did not use writing, iron, or pack animals and whose political horizons were so much narrower? Perhaps these definitional questions do not matter too much: small empires are difficult to distinguish from large states precisely because they are, in many respects, very similar. Unless it is important to establish an unambiguous separation of categories (for example if one were trying to show how some things were
always true of empires and never true of anything else) the vagueness of the term is not a problem. Lenin needed clear definitions for his proposition that imperialism was a particular historical stage, but that is not my purpose here.
¹⁹

The empires to which I will most often compare Rome are those that resembled it most closely in scale and technology. That means great states like Achaemenid and Sassanian Persia, the Mauryan Empire of north India, and China after the Qin dynasty. All these were states with productive agricultural economies, generally dependent on Iron Age technology, and had no source of energy beyond human and animal power, firewood, and perhaps watermills. All employed some form of writing or similar record keeping, and also standardized systems of money, weights, and measures. All were so vast it took weeks to get a message from one side to the other by the fastest communications media of the day, and months for an army to cross. All had elaborate social hierarchies, especially at their courts, and made extensive use of ceremonial and ritual. States of this kind are sometimes called tributary or aristocratic empires. Empires of this kind were typically created when one or more ruling peoples conquered—generally rather rapidly—a number of previously independent subject peoples. Achaemenid Persia was formed from the forced merger of the kingdoms of the Medes, Babylonia, Lydia, and Egypt, all between 550 and 520
BC
. Rome became imperial by first swallowing up other Italian states, then defeating Carthage and finally the major kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. The Qin became imperial by conquering six or seven other kingdoms at the end of the Warring States Period. There are many other examples of this pattern known from around the world. But conquest was only the first stage, and many empires collapsed at the moment expansion stopped: the fate of Alexander the Great’s empire is a case in point. Conquest states needed to transform themselves into stable structures of domination. Their rulers came to depend not only on the use and threat of violence, but also on the tacit support of local elites of various kinds. Through their help levies, tithes, taxes, or some combination of these was extracted. Local rulers took a portion and most of this surplus was put to the task of maintaining order and defending the empire. The residue paid for the extravagant lifestyle of the rulers of the empire. Those rulers also invested heavily in ceremonial and monuments. Most claimed the mandate of heaven, both to reassure themselves and to cow their subjects. Rome was, in all these respects, a fairly typical pre-industrial empire.

What is to be gained from thinking about Rome in these terms? One benefit is that comparison sometimes explains some feature of society that seems odd to us today. That Roman emperors were worshipped as gods seems less strange when we appreciate quite how widespread practices of this kind were in ancient empires.
²⁰
Comparison can also sometimes help us appreciate how unusual one or another feature of the Roman version of early empire was. Citizenship, for example, an inheritance from the city-state cultures of the archaic and classical Mediterranean, is a good example of one respect in which the Roman Empire was unusual. Persian shahs and the Chinese sons of heaven had subjects, not fellow citizens. Perhaps a final advantage is that this kind of exercise reminds us of the difference between appropriate and inappropriate comparisons. Many historians today find themselves making comparisons between modern imperialisms and those of the Roman past. The reasons are obvious enough. Our age has rejected the language of empire, arguably without always surrendering much of its power. Rome enters the discussion not because it is a very close analogy, but because it is familiar, and because modern empires have made so much use of Roman symbols. Modern empires are unlike Rome: the principal difference is not one of morality (racism versus slavery anyone?) but of technology. Lenin was right to insist on the ineradicably modern origins of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialism. Comparative history gives us a sense of perspective: Rome was not unique, but nor was it very like either the British Raj or twenty-first-century superpowers. Rome has its own Romance.