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For my Students
Preface
All histories of Rome are histories of empire. Her rise to power, the long peace, and the even longer decline together form the background to every story told about the Romans. My subject, however, is empire itself. How did it grow? What enabled it to resist defeats and capitalize on victories? Why did Rome succeed when its rivals failed? How did empire survive crises, dig itself in, and replace chaotic campaigns of conquest with stability? How did empire come to coordinate the great flows of wealth and populations on which it depended? How did it evolve to face new needs and new threats? Why did it falter, regain its balance, and then shrink under a series of military blows until it was, once again, a city state? What circumstances and technologies made the creation and maintenance of an empire possible, in just this place and at just that time? What institutions, habits, and beliefs suited Rome for the role? And what did the fact of empire do to all the beliefs, habits, and institutions with which the world had been conquered? What part did chance play in its successes and its failures?
The long arc that stretches from a scatter of villages on the River Tiber to a medieval city on the Bosporus Straits dreaming of ancient glory takes a millennium and a half. Telling that story in a single volume is perhaps a crazy endeavour, but it has also been an exhilarating one. Perhaps Roman history has no special claim on us, among the many periods of the past we can think about and that have shaped our world. But as a student I felt the fascination of studying something so vast, an entity that stretched over so much time and space. What could sustain a human enterprise conceived on such a vast scale? How could anything human last so long? Our own world experiences change at an extraordinary rate. Earlier generations, confident of the permanence of their own empires and of the uninterrupted march of progress, were spellbound by Rome’s decline and fall. For us it is the longevity of Rome that grasps the imagination. My own fascination has not diminished since my student days. Even now the Roman world still
sometimes feels like a vast sandpit in which I can play, or else a huge historical laboratory in which all sorts of long-lived processes and entities can be studied. Roman history is like astronomy in that respect. New experiments cannot be designed and carried out. But a vast mass of distant and ancient phenomena can be observed through tiny packets of residual data, and the forces and cataclysmic events that formed the observable universe can be reconstructed. Like astronomers, ancient historians look for patterns and try to explain them. This book is an attempt to explain those that I have observed.
The Roman Empire invites metaphor. Ancients often used a biological analogy: each empire or state had its youth, its maturity, and its old age. One modern historian has used the metaphor of the vampire bat, seeing the empire as a means through which the Romans sucked the life out of peasants and slaves upon whose labour the empire depended. The Roman Empire does not seem to me much like an organic entity, unless it is an epidemic spreading throughout a host population feeding off the energies of the infected until it burns itself out. Analogies from natural science seem to capture the pattern of empire better. The Roman Empire was like a great tidal wave sweeping up more and more water before dissipating its energy. Or it was an avalanche, starting small, accelerated by the patterns of snow and rock across which it moved, and then slowed again at the base of the slope. Either metaphor captures the sense of a grand pattern that starts small, draws in more matter and more energy, and then dissipates. That pattern— empire—moves through time, and for a while crowds out other patterns, until it dissipates or is overwritten by other great movements. Empire grows, not always smoothly, dominates for a while, and then abates. One former vice-chancellor of St Andrews suggested that I think of this in terms of resonance, the gradual establishment of a pattern of vibration across a vast mass of people and things that eventually loses coherence and breaks down into smaller patterns. That does seem to capture precisely the emergence of an imperial order and its subsequent dissipation. The essence of empire is the assertion of a great pattern at the expense of smaller ones. That pattern is typically less equal and more hierarchical than what went before. New levels of complexity mean some of the rich becoming richer, some of the poor being subjected to harsher discipline, although the social mobility that empire stirs up means there are winners and losers at every level. Materially, the pattern of empire involves regular movements of people and things, great flows of taxes and of commercial goods. Those routines of movement
are now reflected by traces of roads and ports, the fossilized skeleton around which the soft matter of the human empire once hung. I have tried to give attention to the hard matter. But one of the joys of Roman history is that we can also hear the voices of so many of those caught up in it. I have attempted to capture and report their perceptions of empire as well.
Writing this book, I have tried to hold in my mind this sense that empire is a movement through historical time, not a fixed set of institutions. By the end of my story, in Byzantium, everything has changed. Romans speak Greek instead of Latin, the capital is now in what was once a conquered province, and barbarians rule in the old city of Rome. It has a new god, new customs, a new sense of its past and its future. A world of cities had become (again) the world ruled by a single city. Istanbul derives ultimately, from the medieval Greek phrase eis tēn polin, ‘into the city’.Yet it was still Rome.
All the same, some institutions were, for long periods, absolutely central to the long history of empire, and in important ways the world within which Roman power was extended and then contracted was a stable one. I have tried to capture this combination of constant evolution with longlasting structural stability by alternating chapters that carry the story forward with chapters that allow me to stand back for a moment—out of time as it were—and point out something of enduring significance. Attentive readers will notice, as I have, that this division does not absolutely hold. But every so often historians have to make concessions to their material. Another concession to my material is the list of key dates that precedes each narrative chapter: the Romans’ journey was complex as well as long, and as we sit in the passenger seat, the odd road map is occasionally helpful.
Metaphors are one kind of inspiration. Comparison is another. This book is not an exercise in systematic comparative history, measuring Rome against other ancient (or, for that matter, modern) empires. Comparison is an interesting method, but it is fantastically difficult given the gaps in our knowledge of ancient empires and the inconvenience that from one empire to another they are not usually the same gaps. But my argument is informed by reflecting on other empires, sometimes trying to spot a general trend, more often as a way of spotting what is unusual or even unique about the Roman case. Wide reading helps, but I am very conscious how much I have learned from participating in conferences and meetings at which experts in other disciplines have generously shared their knowledge. From many such occasions, I would like to single out a conference organized by Susan Alcock, Terry D’Altroy, Kathy Morrison, and Carla Sinopoli at Las
Mijas in 1997, generously funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, which first gave me the idea for this project, and also an entire series of workshops devoted to the comparative study of empires, organized with extraordinary energy by Peter Fibiger Bang, with funding from the European Science Foundation under COST Action A36 ‘Tributary Empires Compared’.
My understanding also depends, of course, on the research of numerous other historians of Rome. It is impossible to acknowledge all of those whose works have been inspirations or essential guides or both. This book is not a total history of Rome, but an exploration of the theme of empire. All the same, empire is so central to Roman history that I have drawn on a great fund of published works to write it. I have tried in the notes and suggestions for Further Reading to indicate just a few to which I owe a particular debt, and I have tried to indicate recent work above all else, since we have now such good syntheses of past scholarship and since research is moving so fast in this field. Most of this book was written in St Andrews during leave generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust. But parts of it were drafted at UNICAMP, São Paulo, where I was a visiting professor in early 2011 at the invitation of Pedro Paulo Funari. The first draft was completed later that same year at the Max Weber Kolleg of the University of Erfurt, where Jörg Rüpke was (once again) my host.
Many others have contributed to making it possible to write this book. I would like to thank especially my agent Georgina Capel, for encouragement and much more; Stefan Vranka and Matthew Cotton at Oxford University Press for their patience, advice, and enthusiasm; Stefan again and Nate Rosenstein for detailed comments on an earlier draft which has saved me from many errors and made this book much more readable; Emma Barber, Emmanuelle Peri, and Jackie Pritchard at Oxford for their help in the various stages of production; my family for tolerance and reality checks. This is not, of course, my first attempt to explain the larger patterns behind Rome’s imperial history. Reading and contemplation are all very well, but every teacher knows that the true test of understanding is whether or not one can explain an idea to someone else. Professional historians usually try out explanations on each other. But we know too much already, and as listeners and critics we are often too charitable. Any aptitude I have acquired in explanation, I owe to successive generations of students in Cambridge and Leicester, Oxford and St Andrews. For this reason, this book is dedicated to them, with thanks.
Preface to Second Edition
Nearly a decade has passed since the first edition of this book.
Much has changed in the world and in Roman history in that time. Some of the original concerns of the book have become even more acute. Imperialism and colonialism remain high on the political agenda, although our debates over them have now moved to questions of decolonizing the curriculum and ensuring that the practice of history promotes racial justice. Also high on the agenda is our relationship with our environment, and ten years of environmental science have only reinforced the urgency of these issues. These were key concerns of the first edition, and remain so in this edition. Roman historians in the meantime have been researching on an ever widening front, from migration studies to the politics of gender, as well as pursuing traditional concerns such as the nature of Roman understandings of their past, the validity of the ways we periodize their history, and the role of the emperor.
The reviewers of the first edition were generous and constructive—for which I am grateful—and I have tried to take their advice when I could. But I have not followed those who suggested major changes of organization or coverage. Other histories of Rome include more detailed narratives, are more (or less) introductory, include more about poetry or less about slavery. It is a good thing that we have many histories of Rome: this one remains fundamentally the same book as the first edition, with (I hope) some improvements.
I have tried to incorporate some of the most exciting new research published since the first edition. Important work has been carried out at either end of Rome’s story, on the early Republic and on late antiquity. I have tried to take account of some of this, and in particular I have expanded the treatment of late antiquity in the final chapters. Another area in which this edition differs from its predecessor is in the increased attention given to material culture. For the kinds of questions central to this book the boundaries between history and archaeology are quite porous, and much of the new work I have read in the last few years makes use of both whether to investigate how politics played out in space, how Roman cities functioned and were provisioned, or questions of identity and agency. Eric Wolf famously referred to some of the victims of European expansion in the early modern period as the ‘People without History’. Romanists too are now engaged in
trying to recover the experiences of those who were silenced in antiquity. For these investigations too the material world is as vital a source of information as the written one.
For the last six years I have been based in London at the Institute of Classical Studies. This has been a joy and a privilege, and I have benefited from easy access to the amazing resources of the Combined Classical library there and from the company of a great community of ancient historians, classicists, and archaeologists scattered among the colleges, institutes, and museums of the capital, and of many visitors. My thanks and appreciation to all of them.
List of Illustrations
Figures
1. The Prima Porta Augustus displayed in the Braccio Nuovo new wing of the Museo Chiaramonti,Vatican Museums, Rome 19
2. A US Mercury Dime, depicting the Roman fasces 36
3. A bust of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, Roman copy after a Greek original, from the Villa of the Papyri, Ercolano (ancient Herculaneum) in Campania 49
4. The monument at Delphi that commemorated Aemilius Paullus’ victory at Pydna 79
5. The sarcophagus of Scipio Barbatus, Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican 90
6. A slave collar (original in the Museo Nazionale Romano, Terme di Diocleziano in Rome) 102
7. Mithridates VI Eupator king of Pontus portrayed as Hercules in the Louvre, Paris 115
8. Bronze statuette of Cybele on a cart drawn by lions, second half of the second century ad 140
9. Bust of Sulla in the Munich Glyptothek 148
10. Bust of Julius Caesar in the Altes Museum Berlin 153
11. The theatre of Pompey 165
12. One of the fresco wall paintings in the cubiculum (bedroom) of the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale 172
13. The Empress Messalina and her son Britannicus, ad 45, Roman sculpture, marble, Louvre 191
14. The Roman ceremony of the Adventus depicted on a coin 192
15. The tax law of Ephesus (now in Ephesus Museum) 219
16. A detail of Trajan’s Column showing the triumph of the emperor after the first campaign against the Dacians 226
17. Hadrian’s Wall 233
18. The Stabian Baths at Pompeii 252
19. Porphyry statue of the Four Tetrarchs at the Basilica di San Marco, St Mark’s Square,Venice 269
20. An image from the late antique Notitia Dignitatum 271
21. The basilica, formerly Emperor Constantine’s throne room, now a Protestant church, Trier 302
22. The head of a gigantic statue of Emperor Constantine in the Palazzo dei Conservatori at the Capitoline Museum, Rome 319
23. A 1:250 scale model of Rome in the age of Constantine built by Italo Gismondo between 1933 and 1971 which can be seen in the Museum of Roman Civilization at EUR ( EUR (Esposizione Universale Roma) in Rome. Wikimedia 342
24. The outermost circuit walls of Constantinople built between 405 and 413 and completed by the praetorian prefect Anthemius, in effect regent for the boy emperor Theodosius II. They were nearly seven kilometres long and linked the Golden Horn and the Sea of Mamara. Often rebuilt, they remained the main defence of the city for over a thousand years. Shutterstock 343
25. A mosaic portraying the Emperor Justinian from San Vitale, Ravenna 354
26. The amphitheatre at Arles 372
Picture Boxes
1. The ‘Servian’ Walls of Rome 39
2. Naval ram from the battle of the Egadi Islands 73
3. Victory temples in the Largo di Torre Argentina 131
4. The ‘Altar of Ahenobarbus’ 143
5. Statue of Eumachia from Pompeii 184
6. The Hoby Cups 211
7. Warehouse at Ostia 238
8. Firing list from La Graufesenque 255
9. Cistern under Istanbul 328
10. Hagia Sophia 375
1. The peoples of Italy around 300 bc
2. The Mediterranean and its continental hinterlands, showing major mountain ranges and rivers
3. The Republican empire around 100 bc
4. The Roman Empire at its greatest extent in the second century ad
5. The third-century crisis
6. The empire in ad 500
7. Justinian’s reconquest (ad 565)
Notes on Further Reading
The Roman Empire has been the object of serious research for around a century and a half, and imperialism has never been off the agenda. It would be impossible to provide a complete guide to the scholarship on which this book is based, and I have not tried to do so. Each chapter is followed, however, by a few suggestions for further reading. I have recommended only works available in English and have tried to pick the most exciting and most recent works, since new research continues at an astonishing pace. I have also added a few notes to each chapter, some identifying the source of particular quotations or key passages of ancient writers, some acknowledging the source of particular ideas or acknowledging books or articles that were especially helpful when I was writing the chapter. Here too I have concentrated on the most recent work, but I have included a few really crucial items written in other languages. After all, the study of antiquity is an international venture, and the Roman Empire is bigger than any of us. The bibliography at the end of this book gathers together all works cited, but cannot claim to be a comprehensive guide to the subject. Fortunately in the twenty-first century we benefit from a number of very recent and authoritative reference works on all aspects of Roman history.
The best one-volume reference work to all aspects of antiquity is the Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th edn, 2011). A digital OCD, edited by Tim Whitmarsh, is being continually updated at https://oxfordre.com/classics/. The best multivolume dictionary is Brill’s New Pauly (2007), and is also online at https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/brill-s-new-pauly. The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (2000) is the best guide to the topography of antiquity. Harvard’s Late Antiquity: A Guide to the PostClassical World (1999) combines thematic essays with a dictionary
The revised Cambridge Ancient History devotes seven volumes to Rome (1989–2005). It remains a magnificent and authoritative account, especially for political and institutional history. The first volume of the New Cambridge
Mediaeval History (2005) is also relevant to the end of this story, as are the Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire (2008), the Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (2007), and the first volume of the Cambridge History of World Slavery (2011). The eight-volume Edinburgh History of Ancient Rome began appearing in 2012 and is now nearing completion. For those interested in a broad comparative perspective, the Cambridge World History is recommended, especially volumes 3 and 4.
KEY DATES IN CHAPTER I
753 bc Traditional date of the foundation of Rome
509 bc Traditional date of the expulsion of the kings and the foundation of the Roman Republic
264 bc Pyrrhus invades Italy but fails to break Roman hegemony
216 bc Battle of Cannae. Rome’s worst defeat at the hands of Hannibal
146 bc Carthage and Corinth sacked by Roman armies
88 bc Sulla marches on Rome
44 bc Julius Caesar assassinated on the Ides of March
31 bc Battle of Actium ends the civil wars of the late Republic. Conventional beginning of the early empire or Principate
ad 14 Death of Augustus and accession of Tiberius
ad 117 Death of Trajan marks the greatest extent of the Roman Empire
ad 212 Caracalla extends citizenship to most inhabitants of the empire
ad 235–84 ‘The Anarchy’, a prolonged period of military crisis
ad 284–305 Reign of Diocletian. Conventional beginning of the Later Roman Empire ad 306–37 Reign of Constantine
ad 313 Constantine’s Edict of Toleration
ad 361–3 Julian fails to restore the worship of the ancestral gods
ad 378 Battle of Adrianople. Eastern empire’s army defeated by Goths
ad 476 Last western emperor deposed by Ostrogoths
ad 527–65 Justinian attempts to reconquer the west
ad 636 Arab armies defeat Roman forces at Yarmuk
ad 711 Arabs cross the Straits of Gibraltar, invading Visigothic Spain
THE WHOLE STORY
Traditions about what happened before the foundation of the city, or while it was being founded, are more suited for poetic fictions than for the trustworthy records of history.
(Livy, From the Foundation of the City, Preface)
The story of Rome is a long one. This chapter tells it all—at breakneck speed—hitting just the high spots of the millennium-and-a-half-year story of rise and fall. It is intended as a motorway route planner for the book, or a set of satellite images snapped at long intervals, provided for orientation. If you already know the pattern of the Roman past, feel free to skip ahead. If not, enjoy the ride!
The Kings and the Free Republic
The Romans of the historical period believed that their city had been founded by Romulus at a date that corresponds to our 753 bc. Romulus was the first of seven kings. The earlier kings were honoured as founding fathers, the later ones reviled as tyrants. Eventually, the last of the kings, Tarquin the Proud, was driven out of Rome and a republic was founded. The conventional date for this was 509 bc. After Aeneas and Romulus, this
was something like the third foundation of Rome. Its hero was a Brutus. When Julius Caesar made himself dictator for life nearly 500 years later, it was on the base of statues of this first Brutus that graffiti were scrawled, calling on his distant descendant to take up arms and slay the tyrant.
All the surviving accounts of the regal period have this mythic quality. None was written less than three centuries after the supposed foundation of the Republic. Rome in the late sixth century was well below the radar of the Greeks, who would not begin to write even their own history for another century.Yet it is probable enough that Romans did have a monarchy. Many other Mediterranean cities had monarchs in the archaic age, including many of the cities of Etruria just north of Rome. Many of the later institutions of Rome seem best explained as relics of a monarchical state: there was a sacred house in the forum called the Regia, the base of the most senior priest the pontifex maximus.The official who conducted elections if there was a gap between magistrates was the interrex. But few of the details that have been passed down can be trusted. Individual kings were remembered as founders of specific parts of the Roman state. Romulus created the city, populated it, first by declaring it an asylum for criminals and then by organizing the mass kidnapping of Sabine women to provide wives for his followers. Numa, the second king, invented Roman religion. Servius Tullius organized the army, the tribes, and the census, and so on. Stories about the later rulers mostly recall tales told about tyrants across the ancient Mediterranean: they were arrogant rulers and cruel sexual predators, and weak sons followed strong fathers. Charges of this kind were common in the aristocratic republics of the archaic Mediterranean and represent the emergence of new ethics of civil conduct. The Romans also remembered their last kings as foreigners, specifically as Etruscans. Stories about the kings added up to an account of what was central and unique to Rome, at least in the minds of those who told and heard them. Our only real control on these myths is archaeological.
The Republican period lasted nearly five centuries, from the early sixth until the final century bc. It was later remembered as an age of liberty and piety. Those who enjoyed that liberty were the wealthy, especially the aristocratic families which together monopolized political office and religious leadership. The nostalgia of their heirs colours all our history of that period. A few families—the Cornelii Scipiones above all, then later the Caecilii Metelli—were so successful that they effectively dominated the state, rather as the Medici dominated Renaissance Florence. But the source of their wealth was very different. Those who led Rome’s conquest of the
Mediterranean world brought back treasure with which to beautify the city, money with which to buy or occupy land, and slaves with whom to farm it. Rome, like most ancient cities, relied on citizen soldiers. At first most of them were peasants who would join campaigns organized for periods of relative quiet in the agricultural year. Many of them did well out of conquest, and those who lived near enough the city had some influence in the political assemblies that elected Rome’s leaders and made the greatest decisions, such as whether or not to go to war. But Rome never approached the kind of democracy created in classical Athens, where the wealthy were compelled to conceal their riches and to spend part of them on public projects. At Rome power remained in the hands of the few. Most magistracies lasted for only a year, but former magistrates sat for life in a council, the Senate, which in effect directed government, legislation, state cult, and foreign policy. How the Republican aristocracy remained so dominant is one of the big questions of Roman history. Was it the institution of patronage that pervaded Roman society? Or the religious authority they acquired from their priestly functions? Other cities faced revolutions when disaffected aristocrats roused up the people against their rivals. Roman nobles were as competitive as any aristocracy, but somehow restrained themselves from infighting until the very end of the Republic. When that restraint collapsed, their world fell apart.
The Republic was also the age in which Rome was transformed from an Italian city state to the leading power in the ancient Mediterranean world. The kings must have left Rome relatively powerful. The scale of the walls, the probable size of the population, but most of all the early military successes all suggest Rome was already one of the politically powerful cities of central Italy around the year 500 bc. The history of the first few centuries is hazy, but by the start of the third century bc, Rome’s influence extended throughout the Italian peninsula. Colonies dotted strategic points in the Apennines and on the Tyrrhenian Coast, while new roads had opened up communications to the Adriatic. Over the fourth and third centuries Rome fought on all fronts: Gauls to the north, Greeks in the south, a series of Italic peoples in the mountains of the Abruzzi and the arid plains of the Mezzogiorno. In the 270s they attracted the attention of King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who crossed the Adriatic with a large army. Rome was defeated by him in several battles, but survived the war. By the end of the third century, Romans had won two long wars against Phoenician (Punic) Carthage. The first (264–241 bc) was largely a naval war in which Rome captured Sicily
