The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (6 page)

Contrary to modern assumptions, it did not convey blanket equality

or release common people from the responsibility to serve the empire

with their tribute and labor.5

26 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

For all their self-confi dence, Roman intellectuals were also profoundly anxious about the consequences of empire building. In a

speech condemning an abusive governor in Sicily, Cicero warned that

misrule would turn the world against the Rome. “Within the bounds

of Ocean there is no longer any place so distant or so out of the way

that the wanton and oppressive deeds of our countrymen have not

penetrated there in recent years. Rome can no longer hold out against

the whole world—I do not mean against its power and arms in war,

but against its groans and tears and lamentations.”6

Like-minded statesmen worried that unchecked imperial expansion would eventually destroy the republic. The limits of travel

and communication in the ancient world raised serious concerns in

the Senate about whether Roman representative institutions could

include remote alien populations. Even the Greeks brought the threat

of degenerative decadence through their enticing learning, arts, and

material luxuries. Far from exalting in Rome’s triumph over Greece,

Pliny lamented that “through conquering we have been conquered.”7

Conversely, subjugating northern peoples brought the reverse threat

of contamination through the adulteration and debasement of the

superior Roman culture.

Indeed, promiscuity in granting citizenship to useful allies eventually transformed the very nature of the empire. The Greeks defi ed

assimilation, but in the west, where identities were more fl uid, imperial rule produced a new hybrid ruling culture. But this process of

romanization, a modern academic concept, did not mean the metamorphosis of tribal barbarians into civilized Romans. Imperial rule

actually transformed the Romans themselves: as the empire absorbed

a vast array of conquered peoples and cultures, imperial institutions

and values evolved constantly as new groups of elites became citizens.

It is therefore better to think of the culture of the empire as mixed

and borrowed rather than homogenously Roman.

Romans believed that the primary basis of identity in Britain and

the rest of the western empire was the
civitas
. In the Mediterranean

world this term meant a city-state inhabited by citizens (
cives
). In

western Europe, where there were few actual cities, the
civitas
became

a tribal unit. These
civitates
(tribes) were small-scale nonliterate polities, sometimes anchored by an urban center or
oppidum
, in other

cases not. It is tempting to refer to them as “Celts” on the assumption

Roman

Britain 27

that they spoke variants of the same language and shared a common

culture. Herodotus called the inhabitants of southern Gaul “Keltoi,”

but archaeologically there were signifi cant variations in the material

cultures of western Europe in the preconquest era.

Identities were overwhelmingly local in the ancient world, and a

tribal label was not a mark of barbarity. Even the Romans began as

a tribal people. The original inhabitants of the city of Rome divided

themselves into thirty-fi ve tribes, which made tribal membership a

marker of citizenship. Noncitizens in Rome were, by defi nition, tribeless. Under the republic, the tribe became an electoral unit that

organized citizens for military service and taxation. Romans offi cially

inherited tribal identities from fathers and patrons, but the republic

also had the authority to shift citizens from one tribe to another.

In Britain and the rest of western Europe, the Romans assumed

that “barbaric” tribal peoples in the more conventional modern sense

represented a less advanced stage of social development. But in fact

these tribal identities probably emerged in response to Roman imperial expansion. Conventional historical narratives often excused

empire building as a defensive response to hostile “tribal” peoples, but

it is more likely that culturally diverse and multilingual groups on the

imperial frontier coalesced into more coherent political and social units

when faced with economic domination and possible conquest by a powerful expansionist state. The opportunities and risks that came with

closer political and commercial ties to Rome disrupted local patronage

and authority, and the resulting political centralization was thus both a

defensive response and an opportunistic one. This is most likely what

produced the “tribes” in southern Britain in the era between Julius Caesar’s raids and the Claudian occupation. Having conquered a territory,

the Romans explicitly encouraged the codifi cation of tribal identities to

make better sense of alien and fl uid societies. Drawing on the eastern

practice of governing through the leading citizens of Greek city-states,

the Romans treated tribes as urban
civitates
.

The leaders of these new tribes became romanized as they shared

in the benefi ts of the Roman imperial project, but it is much harder

to judge the impact of romanization on conquered majorities. Coopted tribal aristocrats contributed to the evolving imperial culture,

but almost certainly most common people continued to identify more

strongly with their localities than with distant Rome. Assimilation did

28 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

not turn entire populations into Romans and probably did not bring

much relief from demands for tribute, labor, and taxes. The empire’s

aristocratic classes exploited their lower classes without regard as to

whether they were Roman or not. For the vast majority of people,

the Roman conquest did not bring assimilation and a chance to live a

better life. While it exposed subject peoples to new ideas and cultures,

imperial rule primarily brought greater tribute demands and more

effi cient extraction.

Ironically, Rome’s great imperial expansion took place under the

republic, making it a de facto empire before it actually had an emperor.

Rome began as a small city-state in the eighth century b.c., and its

fi rst subjects were its neighbors in the Latin League. The league, a

coalition of culturally related cities, was a mutual defense alliance,

but by the early fourth century b.c. it was fi rmly under the sway

of Rome. The Romans then imposed their will on central Italy and

drove the Greeks from the south. By the mid-third century b.c. they

had become a dominant power in the Mediterranean by defeating

Carthage in the First Punic War. In the last years of the republic,

Rome acquired Greece, most of Spain, Gaul, Libya, Numidia, Egypt,

Syria, and substantial stretches of Asia Minor and the Balkans.

Where the early republican leaders were initially reluctant to make

their annexations permanent, after the civil war of 81 b.c., ambitious

senators and military men often seized territory to further personal

ambitions.

At fi rst the Romans were not conscious empire builders. Sometimes Rome acquired territory at the behest of weak states that

sought its protection; in other instances Romans fought stronger,

threatening powers. In Asia Minor, Rome added Pergamum to the

empire when its rulers made the Roman people their legal heirs. The

Romans usually claimed that they fought to defend themselves, but

as their empire grew, they became increasingly confi dent that it was

their destiny to become a great power. As Cicero declared in 56 b.c.:

“It was by piety and religious scruples and our sagacious understanding of a single truth, that all things are directed and ruled by the gods’

will, that we have conquered all peoples and nations.”8

While popular history lauds the egalitarian virtues of the Roman

Republic, the republic was almost constantly at war. Fighting and

rapacious plunder were facts of life. Victorious generals who killed

Roman

Britain 29

more than fi ve thousand foreigners were entitled to a grand parade

in Rome. The Romans held more than three hundred of these

“triumphs” between 509 and 19 b.c., which means that the republic

dispatched roughly 1.5 million of its enemies during this period.9

These triumphs also demonstrate the naked avarice that lay behind

Rome’s conquests. Livy reported that Titus Quinctius Flamininus,

who defeated Philip V in the Second Macedonian War, showcased

a staggering amount of wealth during his three-day triumph in

194 b.c.:

On the fi rst day, Flamininus put armour, weaponry, and statues of

bronze and marble on display. . . . On the second he displayed gold and

silver wrought, unwrought, and coined. There were 18,270 pounds

of unwrought silver. . . . In coined silver 84,000 “Attic” coins. . . . There

were 3,714 pounds of gold, a shield made of solid gold and 14,514

gold Philippics. On the third day 114 golden crowns which had been

gifts from the city-states were carried in the procession. . . . Before the

triumphal chariot there were many prisoners and hostages of noble

birth, including Demetrius, son of king Philip, and Armenes the Spartan, son of the tyrant Nabis.10

Ambitious men such as Flamininus turned over most of this

wealth to imperial coffers, but they also were careful to give their

common soldiers a healthy share of the plunder.

Unlike the empire builders of later eras, the Romans did not enjoy

a signifi cant technological advantage over their opponents. Most classical Mediterranean armies used similar equipment, and the Romans’

victories came from the superior organization, training, and aggression

of their legions. Consisting of fi ve thousand citizens subdivided into

cohorts and centuries, the republican legion was a highly trained fi ghting

force. Roman commanders augmented the regular army with auxiliary

cohorts consisting of non-Roman subjects and offi cered by aristocratic

Romans. These auxiliaries usually earned Roman citizenship if they

survived their full term of service. The need to keep the legions busy

and out of politics spurred military adventures on the frontiers.

Those who resisted Roman expansion did so at their peril. The

Greek historian Polybius recorded in graphic detail how Scipio Africanus made an example of New Carthage in 209 b.c. by ordering his

men to slaughter the entire population of the city. “They do this,

30 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

I think, to inspire terror, so that when towns are taken by the Romans

one may often see not only the corpses of human beings, but dogs cut

in half, and the dismembered limbs of other animals.”11 Roman forces

similarly destroyed Corinth sixty-three years later. The Romans

nevertheless were inclined to treat surrendering rulers generously.

The same Scipio who destroyed Carthage was magnanimous toward

Heraclea in Asia Minor: “We shall endeavor, now that you have come

under our protection, to take the best possible care of you. . . . We

grant freedom, with the right to administer all your affairs yourselves, under your own laws.”12 The fate of Heraclea demonstrated

that it was safer and wiser to be within the empire than outside it.

Imperial expansion eventually destroyed the republic, but in the

short term the resulting plunder brought marked benefi ts to Rome:

citizens paid no taxes. In Italy allied states were liable for taxes and

military service until their revolt in the Social War of 90 b.c. forced

the Romans to grant them citizenship. This set a precedent for the

wider empire. In Greece, where the greatest returns were through

commerce rather than crude extortion, Rome enfranchised the entire

population of cooperative city-states. In the west, tribal leaders could

earn citizenship, but their small numbers ensured that this generosity did not reduce the fl ow of tribute.

The actual mechanisms of Roman imperial administration, which

seem so familiar as the standard template of imperial rule, evolved

gradually over time. Sovereignty in republican Rome rested with the

consuls, the Senate, and the citizenry, but their infl uence was limited by the ancient world’s realities of time and distance. The Senate

exercised authority over remote territories by assigning consuls or

magistrates who had fi nished their term in offi ce to complete specifi c

tasks in the wider empire. Proconsuls collected revenue, secured food

for Rome, conducted censuses, supervised trade, and, most important, fought wars. Their
provincia
, assignments or tasks, gradually

took on specifi c territorial dimensions. A province came to mean a

magistrate’s geographic scope of operations, and these administrative

boundaries were largely set by the fi rst century b.c.

Appointed by the Senate, their governors were usually ex-consuls

with command of the provincial military garrison. There was no permanent imperial bureaucracy, and these wealthy proconsuls relied

on their personal resources and small private staffs to govern. Their

Roman

Britain 31

primary responsibility was to maintain order and collect tribute.

Governors sometimes had to obey senatorial orders, but for the most

part they had considerable autonomy in dealing with local issues and