The Persian Achaemenid empire of the fifth century BCE was the first even remotely plausible contender. As we saw in chapter 1, it represented a big step up the ladder of macro-social evolution, ushering in the era of empires that covered millions of square kilometers and tens of millions of people. Had the Persian king Xerxes conquered mainland Greece after 480 BCE, it would have become possible for him or a successor to advance into Sicily and peninsular Italy. Conflict with the western Greeks might have provided sufficient motivation: after all, the Persian invasions of mainland Greece had been triggered by its support for a revolt in western Asia Minor.4
Even so, actual history strongly suggests that any such advance would probably have been short-lived. The Achaemenid empire never managed fully to control Egypt, which broke away in the 450s BCE and more enduringly for the first half of the fourth century BCE. At the opposite end, the Indus Valley also appears to have slipped from its grasp. Unable to hold on to their eastern- and westernmost peripheries, the Persians were bound to run into similar problems had they attempted to extend their reach even farther across the complex and densely populated Greek city-state culture that comprised a thousand separate micro-states and at least 7 million people. Greek practices of citizenship, participatory politics, and popular military mobilization supported collective action that would have been difficult to suppress on a grand scale. Under these circumstances, an effective Persian presence in peninsular Italy, beyond the massive cluster of Greek city-states that stretched from Sicily and southern Italy to mainland Greece and western Asia Minor, was not a plausible outcome. Nor was fifth-century BCE Carthage sufficiently well developed to exercise power this far away on Persia’s behalf.5
The Athenian empire was hardly a more promising spoiler. Had Athens and its allies succeeded in defeating Syracuse in the 410s BCE and established a permanent presence in Sicily, further expansion could certainly have taken place. The most plausible scenario would be Athenian involvement in conflict between the Italian Greeks and local populations that might have drawn it more deeply into the affairs of the peninsula, at a time when Rome had barely begun to reach beyond its Latin heartland. This counterfactual faces two serious obstacles. For one, Athens would have found it much more profitable to target Carthage or the vulnerable western periphery of the Achaemenid empire, thus directing its efforts away from an Italian peninsula that had little to offer to the cash-rich Athenians.6
Even more importantly, the requisite notion that Athens and its allies could in fact have evolved into a more unitary and stable state with the potential for sustained expansion—a counterfactual proposed by Ian Morris—neglects the countervailing forces produced by Athens’s exclusivist model of citizenship and direct democracy and the intense fragmentation of its own imperial periphery of city-states. In the end, it may not have much to commend it.7
Athenian engagement with Carthage or Persia seems a more plausible counterfactual in the short term, followed by fission of the Athenian empire itself. But even in this scenario, some form of Athenian intervention in central Italian and thus Roman state formation in the fourth century BCE cannot be ruled out. In view of Athens’s ability to project naval power over long distances, this outcome seems somewhat less far-fetched than that of Persian inference in Italy a century earlier. Before the Latin settlement of 338 BCE, Rome was only a fairly minor regional power that was exposed to outside intervention, especially by sea. Thus, even an Athenian empire that did not survive the fourth century BCE might, under the right concatenation of circumstances, have been able and inclined to do serious damage to Roman state-building (figure 4.2).
On balance, however, the likelihood of this counterfactual occurring was rather low. No comparably aggressive naval powers arose in the Aegean after the Athenian empire collapsed in 404 BCE. In the fourth century BCE, aside from one raid on a Roman ally, Syracuse either focused on its rivalry with Carthage or was hamstrung by domestic disturbances. For these reasons, outside intervention in Roman affairs remained highly unlikely until the final quarter of the fourth century BCE. Between 334 and 325 BCE, the Macedonian king Alexander the Great took over the Achaemenid empire. At the time of his death in Babylon, he was only thirty-three years old. Considerable military assets and vast financial resources were at his disposal. Had he lived, they would have supported further operations elsewhere. An expedition into Arabia that reportedly involved huge naval forces was already being prepared when he succumbed to fever.8
A much later account, arguably based on contemporary observations, credited Alexander with more sweeping plans for the future. They called for the construction of a fleet of 1,000 large warships to wage a campaign “against the Carthaginians and the other inhabitants of the coastal area of Africa, Iberia and the neighboring coasts as far as Sicily,” an itinerary that appears to include the Italian peninsula as well. Whatever the reliability of this story—which has repeatedly been questioned—westward expansion was certainly not unfeasible.9
FIGURE 4.2 The Athenian empire (late fifth century BCE) and the empire of Alexander the Great (323 BCE).
The proposed scheme meshes well with reports of contacts with Italian polities. In Babylon, Alexander is said to have received numerous embassies from the western Mediterranean: from Carthage and other parts of North Africa, from the Iberian peninsula and Sardinia, and also from the Lucanians and Bruttians in southern Italy and the Etruscans north of Rome. Whether a Roman delegation joined in continues to be debated.10
Even without such anecdotes, the geostrategic situation in 323 BCE could hardly have been clearer. Whereas the entire eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern ecumene had fallen under Alexander’s control, the western Mediterranean was highly fragmented. Counterpoised regional powers balanced each other: Lucanians and the Greek city-state of Tarentum in southern Italy, Rome and the Samnites in central Italy, Etruscans and Gauls farther north, and Syracuse and Carthage across the sea.
This environment not only facilitated but encouraged outside intervention, as Alexander would have been able to enter alliances to ease his advance. He might also have had a more specific reason to intervene in Italy. His uncle Alexander, the king of Epirus, had been killed there in battle in 331 BCE campaigning against south Italian tribes. All in all, had it not been for Alexander’s untimely demise, the odds of Macedonian intervention in Italy in the late fourth century BCE would not have been negligible.11
Arnold Toynbee, in his counterfactual essay “If Alexander the Great had lived on,” has the Macedonians conclude an alliance with Rome in 318 BCE that was directed against the Samnites, an arrangement that preserved Rome but severely curtailed its options for future expansion. In this scenario, no Roman empire would have emerged—and it is hard to see how Toynbee’s own counterfactual in which Alexander conquered both India and China, and one of his successors added the Americas, thereby creating a perennial global super-state, could ever have come true.12
Toynbee was by no means the first to ponder the consequences of a Macedonian intervention in Italy. Writing more than 300 years after the death of Alexander, the Roman historian Livy preferred to think that the Romans could have defeated the Macedonians. He was right to emphasize Rome’s superior manpower, a resource that might well have stymied Alexander’s advance, especially as his own reservoir of seasoned Macedonian pikemen had already been depleted. At the same time, Livy neglects to consider how much later Roman troops struggled against the superior tactical skills of professional Hellenistic field armies. Nor was it a given that Rome would have formed an alliance with Carthage: the latter could easily have been overwhelmed first. Backed up by sophisticated siege equipment, a large navy, and full coffers, Alexander—or any ruler of a unified Macedonian-Persian empire—stood a better chance of checking Rome’s progress (whether by defeat or co-optation) than Livy is prepared to accept.13
Even though Macedonian interference need not have stopped Roman expansion in its tracks, it certainly could have. The likelihood of this counterfactual is
considerably higher than those of the previous (and, as we will see, subsequent) ones. This turns the last quarter of the fourth century BCE into a critical juncture of Roman state formation, a time when Rome and its partners faced off against formidable opponents in the Italian peninsula. Even short of outright conquest, outside intervention could have tipped the scales in a way that forestalled the emergence of anything like the later mature Roman-Italian state and alliance system that proved to be an irresistible juggernaut. It is not mere coincidence that both Livy and Toynbee gravitate toward this counterfactual: this was the one time when Rome’s fate arguably did hang in the balance.
In actual history, this rare window of opportunity closed soon after Alexander’s death. Once his general Antigonus had failed to prevent the rival warlord Seleucus from taking over Mesopotamia and Iran (311–309 BCE) or, at the latest, when the former was defeated and killed in 301 BCE, the chances of reuniting Alexander’s domain—if that had indeed ever been any of his successors’ goal—rapidly receded.14
Instead, Alexander’s former lieutenants kept turning on each other, creating an inward-looking system of states that committed enormous resources to inconclusive internecine strife. Meanwhile, Rome was able to pursue its goals in Italy and wrest naval hegemony from Carthage without much outside interference. Focused on competition with other Hellenistic kingdoms and smaller Greek polities, Macedon and the Ptolemies, while logistically capable of intervention, had no compelling reason to become involved in these affairs.
By contrast, a lesser interstitial power such as Epirus (in northwestern Greece and Albania) that had an incentive to operate away from the superior militaries of the Hellenistic core region was too small to inflict any lasting damage once Rome had pressured most peninsular Italian polities into its alliance system. By 280 BCE, when the forces of the Epirote king Pyrrhus landed in southern Italy, the cohesion and manpower reserves of this Roman-led system had already become too strong to overcome.
In the absence of credible challenges from the east, Carthage remained the only available contender. But right from the start, Rome acted more aggressively: in the First Punic War of 264–241 BCE, fought primarily for control of Sicily, Rome staged an ambitious landing in North Africa whereas Carthage never came close to threatening the Roman heartland. A generation later, a planned second attack on Carthage was narrowly prevented by Hannibal’s daring gambit of invading the Italian peninsula. Yet despite major victories against the Roman and allied forces arrayed against him, he only partially succeeded in his objective of dismantling Rome’s alliance system.
The debate about whether Hannibal could somehow have won began in antiquity. It is certainly true that his advance put the Roman system under tremendous strain, and we must not allow ourselves to assume that its perseverance and ultimate triumph had in fact been the most likely outcome. Even so, the most careful analysis to date persuasively concludes that Hannibal could not hope to turn enough allies away from Rome and hold on to them all at once: local rivalries that the Romans had worked for a long time to mitigate had only been suppressed but not eliminated, and once revived by defections and shifting allegiances they undermined the intended creation of a united front against Rome itself.15
Even in the darkest years of this war, Rome was more capable than it would have been a hundred years earlier if attacked by a longer-lived Alexander. Thus, short of the capital’s outright destruction, which its massive fortifications rendered implausible, even Rome’s reduction to a middling power would not have ruled out a later rebound. Continued Carthaginian meddling in Italy might well have prompted the emergence of a new Italian alliance system based on military mass mobilization, with or without Roman leadership. Moreover, it seems highly unlikely that success in Italy would have allowed the Carthaginians to build an empire on a Roman scale: their military manpower was inadequate to the task, and their peripheral geographical position would have been a major obstacle to any deep penetration of the European continent. In the long run, Carthage would have had a better chance of taking over Egypt than reaching Britain, the Rhine, and the Danube.16
Hannibal’s throw of the dice turned out to be the final opportunity for an external opponent to derail Roman imperiogenesis, and an unpromising one at that. After Rome’s victory in 201 BCE left Carthage a client state, none of the Hellenistic kingdoms had any realistic hope of intervening in Italy in an effective manner. This raises the hypothetical question of whether the might of a unified Hellenistic empire would have been sufficient to break the Roman war machine. What if, in an aggressively implausible counterfactual, the Macedonian-ruled successor states had somehow been reunited during the third century BCE, presenting a united front to Rome and its allies by the time of Carthage’s defeat?17
If we simply add up the military forces the major Hellenistic powers could marshal in wartime, we arrive at an imposing tally of about a quarter of a million soldiers, most of whom could have been deployed against Rome, and at least 500 major warships. It is hardly a stretch to imagine that under unified leadership, these resources might well have sufficed to block any further Roman advance for good, and that they could also have been used to carry out attacks against Italy itself.18
It is, however, far from certain that a unified empire could have generated such massive military assets. The numbers for each kingdom and league that we are tempted to sum up were the result of several generations of intense conflict among the successor states, of wars making states and states making wars. From a comparative perspective, it is by no means a given that a single super-state would have had a sufficiently strong incentive to mobilize resources on this grand scale. Both the relative military weakness of the vast and supremely well-funded Achaemenid empire and the fact that the active military forces that were at Alexander’s disposal at the time of his death were rather modest (relative to the size of the subject population) speak against this simplistic assumption. Sustained conflict with a similarly powerful opponent would have been required for a much larger military to be built up and maintained.
By the mid-third century BCE, the Roman war machine had reached maturity by complementing its huge reservoir of infantry with a powerful navy. From that point onward, war with a less mobilized eastern super-state would have found the latter relatively ill equipped to take on this challenge. The necessary military scaling-up would have taken some time, opening the door to Roman successes early on. Thus, even in the exceedingly unlikely event of a later restoration of Alexander’s entire domain, Roman advances were a plausible outcome, even if they might have been bought at higher cost, including perhaps some form of rerun of the First Punic War in the maritime sphere.
DOMESTIC CONFLICT
This far-fetched scenario shows that by this time, even remotely credible external challenges to Roman imperialism had disappeared. Roman power had entered a phase of military superiority so pronounced that internal conflict became the only potential source for failure. The “integrity” variable radically deteriorated on two occasions in the first centuries BCE. The first of these was the Social War of 91–89 BCE between the Roman citizen state and some of its Italian allies. This was a serious rift that not only fractured a centuries-old alliance system but pitted two large and highly mobilized populations against each other. Even so, thanks to Rome’s ability to draw on extensive resources from its provinces and its unified leadership, its survival and ultimate success were the most likely outcome.
In a less likely counterfactual, a resounding victory of the defectors might simply have led to their usurpation of Rome’s overseas possessions and continuing empire under new management. Only a prolonged stalemate within the Italian core could have caused enough damage to upend the imperial project as such. The fact that political concessions were always an option for defusing this clash between long-term partners all but rules out that scenario: the exercise of imperial power over provincials could be reconfigured to benefit Roman and other Italian elites alike. This is a respectable reading of the solu
tion to this war—the enfranchisement of the Italian allies into the Roman citizenry—unless we prefer to interpret it as a sign of the defectors’ defeat.19
The second crisis arose from open warfare between rival parties within the Roman aristocracy. This precipitated intermittent separation of the eastern from the western parts of the empire in 49–48, 42, and 32–30 BCE. Yet looked at more closely, these short if bloody episodes do not support any plausible scenarios of lasting fragmentation or imperial decay. In all these instances, unification by the victorious party was a priori the most plausible outcome. The alternative, enduring stalemate between warlords in control of Italy and the western provinces on the one hand and of the Aegean and the Levant on the other, is somewhat irrelevant and also improbable: irrelevant because the “western” party would have controlled most of Roman Europe, which is the focus of this book; and improbable because the basic fact that military mass mobilization on a grand scale was confined to Italy helped ensure that the leaders of this region would eventually overcome resistance elsewhere.20
More specifically, the fundamental structural imbalance between the concentration of military power in Italy and of economic resources in the western Mediterranean effectively predetermined both the ultimate outcome—imperial unification—and the identity of the victors: namely, those in command of Italian manpower. From this perspective, merely the swift nature of “western” victories in 48, 42, and 31–30 BCE was historically contingent, but not imperial survival and restoration as such.21
Over the very long run, we perceive an arc of probability of failure of the Roman imperial project. Extremely unlikely to be preemptively forestalled by the intervention of early Near Eastern empires that lacked the means to reach, let alone rule, Italy, failure became somewhat less impossible with the appearance of the Achaemenid and Athenian empires. A rather sharp peak was reached with Alexander the Great, when the odds of a significantly different trajectory of state formation—while by no means overwhelming—were much better than before or after. After the Second Punic War had opened up less plausible prospects of alternatives, the likelihood of Roman failure rapidly diminished and indeed almost vanished.
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