by Woolf, Greg
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.
Further Reading
Roman myth-makings about their past and their gradual awakening to an imperial destiny are the subject of Erich Gruen’s Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (London, 1992) and Emma Dench’s Romulus’ Asylum (Oxford, 2005). Andrew Erskine’s Troy between Greece and Rome (Oxford, 2001) is a wonderful study of Rome’s discovery of its Trojan origins. A vivid account of Roman myth-making is Peter Wiseman’s Myths of Rome (Exeter, 2004).
The study of later receptions of Greece and Rome is one of the fastest growing areas of classical scholarship. For the afterlife of Rome and for Rome as a model of empire, see Catharine Edwards’s Roman Presences (Cambridge, 1999) and Margaret Malamud’s Ancient Rome and Modern America (Oxford, 2009). A valuable set of essays is Richard Hingley’s Images of Rome: Perceptions of Ancient Rome in Europe and the United States in the Modern Age (Portsmouth, RI, 2001).
The best introduction to the comparative history of the pre-modern world is Patricia Crone’s Preindustrial Societies (Oxford, 1989). One of the most influential studies of early empires was Jon Kautsky’s The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982). Susan Alcock, Terence D’Altroy, Kathy Morrison, and Carla Sinopoli’s Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History (Cambridge, 2001) faith
fully reproduces the exciting conference that gave rise to it. For a recent essay in systematic comparative history, see Walter Scheidel, Rome and China (Oxford, 2009).
Map 1. The peoples of Italy around 300 BC
KEY DATES IN CHAPTER III
753–510 BC
The Regal Period of Roman history, as calculated by Varro (But an average reign of over 30 years for each of seven kings of Rome is implausible)
509 BC
Rome’s first treaty with Carthage (others followed in 348 and 306) supposedly following rapidly on the foundation of the Republic
496 BC
Traditional date of the battle of Lake Regillus in which Rome defeated the Latin League
494 BC
Traditional date for the first secession of the plebs , the beginning of a long struggle for political emancipation conventionally termed the Conflict of the Orders
396 BC
Traditional date of the destruction of Veii by Rome
390 BC
Traditional date of the Gallic sack of Rome
343–290 BC
Rome frequently at war with Samnites of central Italy (later remembered as three Samnite wars)
340–338 BC
War with the Latins ends in the disbanding of the Latin League.
336–323 BC
Reign of Alexander III (the Great) of Macedon, conqueror of Greece and the Persian Empire
287 BC
The Lex Hortensia makes decisions of the plebeians binding on the community as a whole. The conventional end of the Conflict of the Orders.
280–275 BC
Pyrrhus of Epirus campaigns in Italy against Rome and Sicily against Carthage and then returns across the Adriatic
NB Most dates before Pyrrhus’ invasion derive from conjectures made by antiquarians in the last century BC . The first serious histories of the west were those written by Timaeus of Sicilian Tauromenium and by Fabius Pictor (of Rome) in the early and later third century BC respectively. Both works are lost, but later writers made some use of them in works written in the second century BC and after.
III
RULERS OF ITALY
What you see before you, stranger, now mighty Rome, were grassy hills before the days of Trojan Aeneas. Evander’s wandering cattle rested where now the Palatine temple to Naval Apollo stands high. These golden temples grew for terracotta gods, content to live in simple houses built without art.
(Propertius, Elegies 4.1.1–6)
Almost no Greek writer mentions Rome before 300 BC, and no native historian before 200 BC. By the time these histories were written, Rome was already the dominant power within Italy. During the third century BC, the Romans fended off Pyrrhus of Epirus’ invasion of southern Italy; fought and won a twenty-three-year-long naval war against Carthage; consolidated their power over the Greek cities of Campania and southern Italy and the peoples of the peninsula’s mountainous spine; and began the conquest of the Gallic inhabitants of the regions north of the Apennines and south of the Alps. The final two decades of the century saw Rome survive Hannibal’s invasion of Italy and carry war back to Carthage. Victory at Zama in 202 ended Carthaginian regional ambitions forever, even if the city survived another half-century before it was obliterated. Rome at the start of the second century BC enjoyed a dominant position at the geopolitical centre of the Inland Sea. It was equipped with institutions, ideologies, and experience geared to conquest. From that point on, control of the whole Mediterranean world was only a matter of time.
How the Romans reached that position is more puzzling. Ancient narratives are transparently written in the knowledge of (and often to explain) Rome’s imperial destiny. Myths of divine favour and mortal virtue, and tales of the heroic exploits of the ancestors of this or that aristocratic clan, can hardly be the basis for our history. Even those Roman historians who were reasonably sceptical of those stories tended to use the better-known histories of Greek cities as a pattern for their own reconstructions. Their accounts present a Rome at times impossibly primitive, like the pastoral idyll Propertius summons up beneath the golden temples of Augustan Rome, or else fantastic tales of palace intrigues worthy of Homeric courts. For all these reasons, a reliable account of early Rome must begin from archaeology.
The City on the Tiber
Perhaps no archaeological site has been the object of such intense scrutiny as the city of Rome.1 The site has been continually occupied since the Bronze Age. Layered remains of medieval, Renaissance, and later cities make it difficult to reconstruct even the imperial capital of Augustus in detail. That megalopolis, with its great monuments and a population of around a million, was itself the product of centuries of rebuilding. Construction reached a particularly frantic phase during the late Republic. It was already widely reported in Pliny the Elder’s day, (the early Flavian period) that in 78 BC
no house in Rome was more beautiful that that of Marcus Lepidus [the consul], but by Hercules within thirty-five years the same house did not rank in the top one hundred mansions.2
By the end of the Republic many aristocratic houses and temples were being reconstructed every generation on ever more lavish scales, funded by the proceeds of overseas conquest. Recovering material from the origins of Rome beneath all of this is very difficult, and its interpretation remains highly controversial.3
At the beginning of the last millennium BC communities of Iron Age farmers had already established villages on the tops of the low tufa plateaux that approached the River Tiber where it made a slow curve around the little plain that would become the Field of Mars. Each village had one or more cemeteries. The best known is at Osteria dell’Osa, in use from the ninth to the seventh centuries.4 The organization of the burials and the distribution of the grave goods suggest it was shared by a number of clans, and also that it was used both by families of high status and by their humbler dependants. It is likely that the separate identities of these villages, and of their ruling families, also explain the later location of a number of key temples on each of the hills of Rome. How, and how early, these communities began to work together as a single polity is obscure: there are far too many gaps in the record.
The story of urbanism in central Italy is interwoven with that of Phoenician and Greek penetration of the western Mediterranean. Phoenicians and Greeks first appeared in the ninth and eighth centuries respectively, powered by economic growth at home and exploiting slight but significant technological advantages in navigation and warfare.5 Indigenous Iron Age societies were everywhere drawn into relationships of one kind or the other with the new arrivals. Exploration and trade typically came first; colonial foundations followed in some areas. Eventually, Phoenicians would settle in North Africa, western Sicily, and southern Spain; Greeks in eastern Sicily and southern Italy and eventually Mediterranean France. Bases like Marseilles near the mouth of the Rhône, and Spina at the northern end of the Adriatic, opened up trade routes into central Europe. Phoenicians and Greeks went on to explore the Atlantic coast too, seeking tin from the British Isles and exotic goods such as ivory from West Africa. But at first things were probably much more confused. There is early evidence for both Phoenician and Greek presence in coastal Etruria. It was metals that first drew visitors to central Italy.6 During the eighth century the Etruscans to the north of Rome and Campanians to the south began to be enriched by trade with the newcomers. Etruscans had already begun to develop complex urban societies and states before easterners arrived; they were well positioned to repel would-be colonists, and enthusiastically traded metal grain for eastern luxuries.7 Their enthusiasm was so marked that this period of Etruscan culture is often called the Orientalizing period, and for a while many scholars believed that in their case the myths of eastern origins were actually true. Further south, Campanians and others were less able to resist Greek settlement: a string of new Greek cities were founded in southern Italy, the most northerly being Cumae.
Rome was located between the two, in the region known to ancients as Old Latium. Duri
ng the ninth and eighth centuries the material culture of this region diverged from that of neighbouring regions and developed a style of its own, but one noted for its relative poverty. There are fewer rich burials than in Etruria, its warrior graves contained many fewer eastern imports, its population probably did increase, but it was scattered in smallish settlements that could not compare either with southern Etruscan centres like Veii, Tarquinii, and Caere, or with the Greek cities at Cumae and Naples. At the northern edge of Latium was the cluster of villages at the Tiber crossing.
When did this cluster of villages first come to form the community of the Romans? Recent excavations have uncovered a number of huts and burials and some kind of defensive wall dating to the eighth century, but it is very difficult to be certain what these tantalizing fragments represent. Was Rome already on the road to urbanism? Or still just a scatter of villages? During the late seventh century the swampy valley north of the Palatine was drained, creating what would become the forum. At some point in the sixth century massive walls were constructed in some places. Both projects must have taken some labour and some organization. The earliest of Rome’s great temples, on and around the Capitol, are also sixth century in date. All these enterprises would have taken a great deal of manpower, and testify to some kind of collective organization. From the sixth century, too, survive the first traces of massive aristocratic houses, located on the southern edge of the forum. From this point on it seems reasonable to think of Rome as a city with defined districts and some centralized institutions. But the division of space was fairly rudimentary. The early forum perhaps served a whole range of commercial, political, and religious functions, and the Capitoline Hill would for centuries be both a religious sanctuary and a refuge/citadel. But for some purposes at least the inhabitants of Rome seem have come together as a single people.