Rome: Empire of the Eagles
Rome: Empire of the Eagles
Neil Faulkner
First published 2008 by Pearson Education Limited
Published 2013 by Routledge
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Typeset in 9.5/14pt Mellor by 35
Contents
List of maps and plates
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Note on ancient monetary values
Maps
Prologue
1 The making of an imperial city-state, c. 750–367 BC
2 The rise of a superpower, 343–146 BC
3 The Roman revolution, 133–30 BC
4 The Pax Romana, 30 BC–AD 161
5 The decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire
Timeline
References
Bibliographical notes
Index and glossary
Plates
List of maps and plates
Maps
1 Ancient Latium and its neighbours, 7th–5th centries BC
2 Early Rome, 7th–5th centries BC
3 Central Italy during the Samnite Wars, 343–290 BX
4 Italy at the time of the wars against Tarentum and Pyrrhus, 282–275 BC
5 The Western Mediterranean at the time of the Punic Wars, 264–202 BC
6 The Eastern Mediterranean at the time of the Macedonian Wars, 215–146 BC
7 The Roman Empire in the Late Republic, 133–30 BC
8 The provinces of the Roman Empire in the mid 1st century AD
9 The Roman Empire from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius, 30 BC–AD 180
10 Roman Britain
11 Imperial Rome
12 The Roman Empire in Late Antiquity, 3rd–5th centuries AD
13 A new world order: the Mediterranean region in the late 5th century AD
Plates
[In central plate section]
1 The Low Ham mosaic in Somerset depiciting a thousand-year-old myth that has the Roman race founded by the Trojan hero Aeneas, a story immortalised for Roman (and Romanised) audiences by the great Latin poet Virgil.
2 The ‘Capitoline Wolf’, an archaic bronze that reminded contemporary viewers that the Romans were spawn of Mars and sucklings of the She-Wolf.
3 A hut-urn, used to inter the cremated remains of Rome’s 8th century BC dead.
4 An Italic hoplite of the Early Republican period.
5 Temple of Hera at Paestum.
6 The quinquereme, essentially a muscle-powered ram; the battleship of the 3rd century BC.
7 Gaius Marius abandoned carts and made his soldiers carry their equipment on their backs: part of the growing professionalisation of the army under the Late Republic.
8 Coin of the Social War rebels.
9 Pompey the Great. The Late Republic was dominated by a succession of great warlords whose power eclipsed that of their senatorial colleagues and presaged that of the emperors.
10 Luxuria (the extravagant and conspicuous consumption of wealth) became more socially acceptable among the elite under the Late Republic.
11 The Roman Forum.
12 Cicero. Though a ‘new man’, he became the leading representative of senatorial reaction in the middle of the 1st century BC.
13 Julius Caesar, the greatest politician and general of the Late Republic, and the man who finally destroyed the power of the senatorial aristocracy and inaugurated the regime of the ‘new men’.
14 The siege of Alesia, 52 BC; an apocalyptic climax to Caesar’s eight-year conquest of Gaul.
15 Octavian-Augustus. A murderous civil-war faction leader is transformed into a heroic monarch in all but name by the spin doctors, in-house poets and court artists of the new Augustan regime.
16 Augustus’s image-makers portrayed him both as a paternalistic ‘father of his country’ and as a statesman-like commander-in-chief who guaranteed national security and internal order.
17 The Res Gestae – Augustus’s political testimony – inscribed in stone and placed on public view at various places across the empire.
18 The Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace) in Rome, rich in political symbolism, showing Rome’s senatorial aristocracy.
19 The Ara Pacis again; showing the imperial family, women and children included.
20 Behind a mask of constitutional rectitude was the fist of military power. The Praetorian Guard was stationed in Rome, and, as events in AD 41 proved, it, and not the Senate, was the final arbiter of power.
21 The enemy within. Onto the floor of this room fell the debris – benches, tables, writing implements – of the first-floor scriptorium where the Dead Sea Scrolls were inscribed: a call to revolutionary holy war against the Roman Empire.
22 A Roman base in the Judean Desert outside the Jewish fortress of Masada, where the last of the revolutionaries of AD 66–73 defied the might of Rome.
23 The Colosseum is Rome’s Auschwitz: built for the mass murder of slaves as a form of public entertainment.
24 Hadrian’s Wall.
25 Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens.
26 The Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome has the form of a traditional victory monument – but this had been a war to eject Germanic invaders after the frontier defences on the upper Danube had collapsed.
27 On the Arch of Septimus Severus at Leptis Magna in Libya, the new emperor appears with his two sons in a conventional scene.
28 A victory monument with a difference. The Sassanid emperor receives the submission of the captive Roman emperor Valerian on a rock carving at Naqsh-i-Rustarn.
29 The end of the pax Romana. Portchester Castle, a Roman fort on the ‘Saxon Shore’.
30 Roman towns were also walled by the Late Empire – even as urban life within declined – turning them into the strong points of a developing system of defence-in-depth.
31 The Notitia Dignitatum of c. AD, with its titles, lists and
badges of office, bears testimony to a bloated centralised state expanding at the expense of civil society.
32 Theodosius the Great, the last emperor of a united empire.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Tim Cornell, Richard Gosling, Steve Roskams and Philip de Souza for the time taken to read and critique this book in draft. Significant corrections are the result. Needless to say, none of these readers is in any way responsible for what follows. I am also grateful to the many, often very vocal, adult education students whom it was my great pleasure to teach and debate with at Richmond Adult and Community College and The City Literary Institute.
Publisher’s acknowledgements
We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:
Bridgeman Art Library/Somerset County Museum, Taunton Castle, UK, for plate 1; Corbis/Araldo de Luca for plate 2; akg-images Ltd/Andrew Baguzzi for plate 3; the Bridgeman Art Library Ltd/Louvre, Paris, France for plate 4; Corbis/Marco Cristofori for plate 5; akg-images Ltd/Peter Connolly for plate 6; DK Images/Karl Shone for plate 7; the Trustees of the British Museum for plate 8; Alamy Images/Visual Arts Library (London) for plate 9; David Bellingham for plate 10; Punchstock/Brand X for plate 11; Corbis/Sandro Vannini for plate 12; akg-images Ltd for plate 13; akg-images Ltd/Peter Connolly for plate 14; Corbis/Roger Wood for plate 15; akg-images Ltd/Nimatallah for plate 16; DK Images/Mike Dunning for plates 17 and 23; Ancient Art & Architecture/C M Dixon for plates 18 and 19; DK Images/De Agostini Editore Picture Library for plate 20; Alamy Images/Robert Estall Photo Agency for plate 24; Alamy Images/Steve Allen Travel Photography for plate 25; Corbis/Araldo de Luca for plate 26; Marcus Prinis & Jona Lendering for plate 27; Alamy Images/Robert Harding for plate 28; TopFoto for plate 29 and akg-images Ltd/Pirozzi for plate 32.
In some instances we have been unable to trace the owners of copyright material, and we would appreciate any information that would enable us to do so.
Introduction
The world of Rome, with its wars of conquest, slave labour, bloody games and crucifixions, can seem a terrible one. Or, thinking of town planning, civil engineering, bath-houses, mosaic pavements and Latin literature, Rome can appear a peak of human cultural achievement. Which of these is dominant? Rome the bloody conqueror or Rome the great civilizer? Should we deplore the historical example of Rome, or admire it, perhaps even seek to emulate it?
Some are making open comparisons between Rome and today’s American Empire. The office of Donald Rumsfeld, neo-conservative US Secretary of State under George Bush junior, sponsored a private study of great empires, including the Roman, asking how they had maintained their dominance and what the United States could learn from them. British diplomat Robert Copper, imagining ‘a new kind of imperialism … acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan values’ which might be promoted by the EU, has suggested that ‘like Rome, this commonwealth would provide its citizens with some of its laws, some coins, and the occasional road’. When the Islamic militant Osama bin Laden called for ‘a general mobilisation to prepare for repulsing the raids of the Romans’, it was a metaphor for holy war against the American occupation of Iraq. Ancient historians Tom Holland and Peter Jones, writing in the BBC History Magazine, debated whether US power offered parallels with the Roman imperium. And Alex Callinicos, a leading left-wing intellectual, compared the US and British invasion of Iraq in 2003 with that of the 4th century Roman emperor Julian in the opening passages of his recent book The New Mandarins of American Power. The past, it seems, is about the present.
This book is a contribution to the debate. Though trained as a Roman archaeologist, I also taught Roman history for about ten years, mainly at two London adult education colleges. As a Marxist, I approached the subject in a distinctive way, but I also found myself at odds with ‘orthodox’ Marxist accounts of the ancient world. In particular, I found the concept of a ‘slave mode of production’ both empirically unsound and of little explanatory value. In the Roman world, most of the exploited were not slaves, and most of the surplus accumulated and consumed by the ruling class was produced by non-servile labour. Even when slaves were important – notably in Italy and Sicily during the 2nd and 1st centuries BC – this fact did not appear to have affected the character of Roman imperialism in any fundamental way. In relation to this, three points are worth stressing. First, the exploitation of slaves does not seem to have been so very different from the exploitation of other categories of rural labour (serfs, debt-bondsmen, tenants, seasonal wage-labourers). Second, the taxes, labour services and compulsory requisitioning imposed by the Roman state seem to have been as significant in generating surplus as the revenues raised by landowners from their estates; and the former was a type of exploitation that could be visited even on peasants who owned their own land. Third – and for me the most important point – war probably contributed more surplus in the Roman Empire than either taxes or rents. Rome was, in its very essence, a system of robbery with violence.
So what I offer is a story with a message: a narrative of Roman history driven by a single, comprehensive interpretation. I argue that Rome was a dynamic system of military imperialism – of robbery with violence – and that its rise and fall, its conquests and defeats, its revolutions and civil wars can best be understood as manifestations of this. Let me stress that the conceptual framework has not been ‘imposed on the evidence’: it has grown out of it. After all, as I say, mine is not an ‘orthodox’ Marxist interpretation; it is something that has been worked out afresh through long engagement with the narrative. Evidence and theories have interacted. Evidence demanded explanation and pointed in certain directions. Theories attempted to organize evidence meaningfully, but were sometimes changed by counter-evidence. And the working out was done partly through discussion with colleagues and students. The result is a narrative of Roman history reconfigured by a distinctive and substantially new interpretation.
Something must be said also about matters of detail. I aim to tell a story. I have turned what I know of the evidence into a narrative. In fact, the evidence is often weak and open to alternative interpretation; much of Roman history is fiercely argued, and one can say little of substance that is wholly uncontroversial. So, as I used to tell my students, what I offer is ‘an interpretive narrative’ – a story that makes sense, that respects the evidence, and that amounts to a possible history of what happened and why. But much is open to debate, and I do not engage in debate in the text. There is not the space for it. This, relative to its subject, is a short book. Also, it is aimed at the general reader (though I hope students will find it useful and scholars be interested by the interpretation). For these reasons, I have dispensed with the customary academic apparatus of argument, references and footnotes. Because the book is a broad synthesis, scholars will know the evidence and debates, while students will find the bibliographical essay an efficient introduction to the more specialized literature. But because the text is devoid of the rather tedious argument, qualification and referencing obligatory in more formal academic writing, it demands this all-embracing caveat: much of the detail in what follows is open to dispute, and the general interpretation in particular is highly controversial.
Controversy is inevitable. We live in an age of empire and war. As I write this, the American Empire is escalating its war in the Middle East, a war which has already killed two-thirds of a million people. But the Empire has powerful friends and many influential, well-funded, high-profile apologists. The American Empire can be a force for good, they tell us. Like the British Empire. Like the Roman.
The war in Iraq is being fought for oil, profit and US power. Yet the lie endures that it is about democracy and freedom. Rome was the same. The spin stressed peace, law and civilization. The reality was carnage and looting to enrich a few. That reality is this book’s theme.
Neil Faulkner
St Albans
February 2007
Note on ancient monetary values
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p; The coinage of the Roman Empire in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD was based on a golden aureus, silver denarii (25 to the aureus), and base-metal sestertii (100), dupondii (200), asses (400), semisses (800), and quadrantes (1,600). But many eastern cities continued to issue their own coins using a Greek system based on minas, drachmas and obols (with various multiples and fractions of these). In either case, the basic currency unit tended to be a silver coin – denarius or drachma/tetradrachma – but the weights of these could vary quite a lot (4.5 gm was about average for the denarius), and the actual silver content much more so (from 90 per cent to perhaps as little as 20 per cent). Larger amounts of money might, however, be expressed in terms of talents – though these were never coined – one talent being 26 kg of silver and therefore almost 6,000 denarii (or drachmae/tetradrachmae).
It is notoriously difficult to convert ancient monetary values into modern equivalents, especially since it is relative purchasing power, not nominal equivalents, that we are really interested in. A key question is: what constituted a living wage? Agricultural labourers received one denarius for a day’s work, and it has been estimated that a typical peasant family of six would have needed about 180 denarii a year for basic subsistence. The annual pay of Roman soldiers was 225 denarii for a legionary, 150 for an auxiliary cavalryman, and 75 for an auxiliary infantryman. Deductions may have been made for food, fodder, clothes, equipment, and the regimental burial club, but on the other hand soldiers had free accommodation, generous bonuses, and did not pay tax.
Richard Reece proposes a modern British equivalent of about £25 ($49) for a denarius (or drachma/tetradrachma), which would give £4,500 ($8,900) as the minimum peasant family income, £5,625 ($11,128) for legionary pay, £3,750 ($7,419) for auxiliary cavalry, and £1,875 ($3,709) for auxiliary infantry. One talent would, on the same reasoning, represent £150,000 ($296,775) in today’s values. These figures should not, of course, be compared with income levels in modern western societies, where the average standard of living is high; the ancient world was a pre-industrial society with much lower levels of material culture.
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